


drive it home with one headlight

by BlackHolesandUnicorns



Category: Homestuck
Genre: 90s Nostalgia, Failed Relationships, Failed/Background/Unromantic JaneJake, M/M, Making Up For Past Mistakes, Regret, compulsory heterosexuality, soft sci-fi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-11-02
Packaged: 2020-05-14 21:21:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 24,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19281412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackHolesandUnicorns/pseuds/BlackHolesandUnicorns
Summary: Some mistakes are so fucking big that they divert the path of your life entirely, sending you somewhere you were never meant to go. Some mistakes are so seismic and so obvious that when you look back on your life all you can see is the beacon where you made them. Some mistakes leave you so far off course you don't even recognize who you are or why you're still here.You don't usually get a chance to make amends.





	1. a broken heart disease

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published October 2017. Repost of deleted fic, same author + different account. Not edited from original posting. This is probably the fic I've written that I'm the most proud of, and I hope everyone enjoys seeing it again.

_Tell me do you think it'd be all right_   
_If I could just crash here tonight_   
_You can see I'm in no shape for driving_   
_And anyway I've got no place to go_   
_And you know it might not be that bad_   
_You were the best I'd ever had_   
_If I hadn't blown the whole thing years ago_   
_I might not be alone_   
_Tomorrow we can drive around this town_   
_And let the cops chase us around_   
_The past is gone but something might be found_   
  


* * *

You meet him while planting trees in the mountainous wilds of Alberta, Canada. He’s trying to make money for uni. You’re just looking for an adventure.

It’s 1996.

You’re both seventeen.

He’s tall, lanky, and ginger. He speaks with a lazy Texas drawl and can plant a hundred trees a day. He’s the only person in the camp who somehow never smells like BO. He tends to sit in the back of the truck and read thick books with long titles on the way to and from planting sites. He always has dark circles under his eyes, and you wonder if he’s okay, but his work never falters, so it’s probably none of your business. His jokes are deadpan, his vocabulary is well-stocked, and his politics are liberal.

One day, when you’re planting near each other, he pulls off his shirt under the blazing hot afternoon sun. You can’t stop looking at him. He’s absolutely covered in freckles. His nipples are pale pink. He has rows of ribs you bet you could play like a xylophone showing through his underbelly-pale skin. Within an hour, he’s red as a lobster.

Your planting totals for the day are knackered. It’s a bad cheque. You lay in your sleeping bag that night and try not to overthink why you got so far behind.

But it’s hard not to. You’re a hard worker. You love the work. The earth beneath your fingers and the sense of creating life. It’s the sort of good, hard, honest labour that gets you stoked. Your planting totals are usually the envy of the entire group. But when Dirk Strider took off his shirt, it got you mighty distracted.

You sit by him at the fire one night.

Turns out, he’s good to talk to. 

He doesn’t just like dry-looking books by long-dead philosophers. He’s a bit of a fiend for films, too, and eventually admits to having a taste for comic books. He likes video games, which you’ve never been so much for, but you find yourself getting psyched up about Chrono Trigger, too, when he gets to talking about it. There’s a passion in him that echoes with one in you, and there are moments when you connect like a conduit and find yourselves completely caught up in one another. Sometimes, you’re up talking long after the fire dies down to embers. He confesses that he’s grateful for the company. Eternal insomniac that he is, he’s usually up this late just staring at the roof of his tent and praying away the minutes, wishing his walkman hadn’t run out of battery an hour before. He likes being around people, he admits. He’s just not very good at it.

You’re glad for the company, too, most of the time. Glad for _his_ company, at least.

The two of you compete for planting records. Sometimes, you boast gleefully at having trashed his piddling efforts. Other times, he surprises you, focuses up, and blows you out of the water. People start just treating the two of you as a unit, a package deal. And that’s nice. Feeling like you’re part of something. Back home, you’re the kind of guy everybody likes but nobody really… gets.

You say this to Jane on your weekly call home one afternoon, sitting on a bench with the phone cord curled around from inside the booth, drawing patterns in the dust.

“Nobody?” she echoes testily, and you realize your mistake.

“Not -- not _nobody_ , Janey! Just, you know, not all the toms and dicks and harries who are always swinging off my coattails and whatnot, and…”

The rest of the call is the kind of blow-out fight that you’ve only ever had once before, and you spend the ride back to camp sitting with your head in your hands, replaying every wool-headed thing you said and wishing you could go back and rewrite it all.

Later, with the moon high above, the freezing mountain cold setting in for the night, the fire burning down, and the rest of the camp asleep, you tell Dirk about it.

He gets real quiet.

Then he kisses you.

Without even thinking about it, you kiss him back.

You kind of just intentionally turn off your brain as you go back to his tent. You clamp a hand over his mouth when he moans, and get distracted gazing into his eyes. It’s 1996. Seventeen year olds don’t know how to have proper gay sex. It’s clumsy, messy, and there’s some discomfort for both of you. But it’s good, too. It’s so good. Things really get going, after some fumbling fuck-ups, and when you’re fucking him in long, smooth strokes against his sleeping bag, swallowing his moans into your mouth, you can’t help but think that it never felt this good, this fulfilling, this _right_ with Jane.

The rest of the camp probably knows something is going on. They don’t say anything, though. It’s summer, and they’re tree-planting, and it’s kind of a different world. There are a few off colour comments. You don’t really mind, and Dirk blushes charmingly, ducking his head and mumbling excuses.

It’s good.

Then summer ends.

A few days before camp is going to close up for the fall, you’re lying together, looking up at the stars. Your breath is visible in small puffs, and there’s a warm flannel blanket half-thrown over you both.

Dirk makes a humming noise.

“Are you going to try to get into Princeton, then?” he asks.

That’s the moment everything splinters.

“I -- what? No,” you answer, stupidly flabbergasted. “No, I -- I’m not going to uni. Not at first, anyway! I want to do a year in Spain, too, and a year in Japan, and --”

“Okay,” he agrees. You hear the tightness in his voice. “That’s fine. I’m already accepted, that’s all, but hey -- you know, fuck it. I can put it off. Go with you. It sounds kind of fun, actually.” He turns, nuzzling into your neck.

You had no idea this had gotten so… misunderstood.

“Didn’t...” Your throat is closing up. You try to breathe. It’s hard. It’s really hard. “Didn’t I… I told you, right? I told you, Dirk, didn’t I? I -- I’ve got a girlfriend, back home. Jane. It’s real serious. I told you, didn’t I?”

It’s quiet for a moment. He doesn’t know what to say. Shit. Fuck. How did you fuck this up so bad?

He rolls over and stands up. You hear him rustling in the grass, walking away a few paces and then walking back. His movements are quick and agitated. You close your eyes, cringing for the blow.

“What the fuck,” he finally snaps, his voice tight as a cord in the dark. “What the fuck has this even been? Yeah! Yes, you fucking told me about Jane! A month ago, before sleep, and I was pretty much under the impression that you were going to break it off on the phone! Or at least when you got home!”

You want to say sorry. Or, rather, you know you _should_ say sorry. Try and explain. But you don’t want to say anything. You want to just close your eyes and plug your ears and wish yourself somewhere else.

“What _is_ this, Jake?” he asks, a whipcrack across you. “Holy shit. Is this -- am _I_ \-- oh my god. Is this just your straight guy homo summer adventure? Am I a risque chapter in your shitty Indiana Jones wannabe memoir?”

“No! No, that’s not the thing at all, Dirk, how hold on, hold up, there, listen, I --”

“Give me a straight answer! Does this thing between us end on fucking Labour Day, Jacob goddamn English, because I swear to god, I swear…”

You can’t talk your way out of this one.

So you don’t. You say nothing, you give no answer, until he leaves.

And that’s just… it.

You go back to your tent alone that night. It’s cold, achingly so. You curl onto your side and cry. Someone is going to hear you, but you don’t care. You cry anyway, you cry your stinking stupid guts out, and then morning comes. Dirk won’t even look at you, much less talk to you.. The camp quickly takes sides, and everything is tense and horrible and torturous until the entire site closes down a week later.

You want to find a magical solution to fix it, but you just… can’t figure it out. How to fix things with him, without ruining the rest of your goddamn life.

In the end, he catches an early flight back home, in the dead of night. Nobody tells you about it. You don’t get to say goodbye.

*

You do your year in Spain. Your year in Japan. One in Brazil, one in the Congo, and you take a trip down the Euphrates river for good measure.

You send pictures to his address. Include letters, telling him about what you’re doing. But you never write apologies or explanations, because you never know how. You never get a return to sender, but you never get a reply, either.

*

You propose to Jane at the stroke of midnight, 2000, right when everyone thinks the world is about to end from Y2K. You don’t do it because you want to marry her, but because she wants you to marry her, and you’ve run out of ways to say no. In a way, you sort of hope Y2K does its dirty work and wipes you all out, but it doesn’t. The millennium dies peacefully and the new one is born.

Jane says yes.

*

In October of 2001, you're set to marry Jane.

You put it off as long as possible, scratching out nearly two more years of globetrotting. But after what happened in New York, everyone you know, family and friends and Jane, can’t stand to think of you out there in the big, dangerous world. It’s safer at home. You should just stay at home.

The night before your big white wedding, you call an operator in Austin, Texas. You desperately ask for her to give you the phone number for Dirk Strider, but she can’t find him. You get on the internet, searching for directories. You try that Classmates.com site, but you can’t remember Dirk’s high school. You do just about everything to track him down, sure that things will make sense if you can just hear his voice again.

But you can’t find him.

You think about just walking out into the night and disappearing forever, but you know Jane. She’d come after you, find you, and that would be a whole lot harder to deal with.

So you marry her.

*

For about a year, it’s fine. It’s not wonderous or brilliant or heart-stoppingly romantic, but it’s the sort of life you can imagine just living your way through until it ends.

Then your first kid is born. Almost immediately, you know something’s terribly wrong. With your life. With the world. With you, with your stupid head. People had kept telling you through Jane’s entire pregnancy that it would all come together and make sense and be _good_ when you looked into your baby’s eyes, but you don’t feel anything but panic. The beautiful little miracle that your wife slaved over for almost an entire day is so vulnerable, so weak, so fragile, and you’re such a clumsy bastard.

You’re going to make a mess of it.

God and fucking Jesus help you, you’re going to make a mess of it.

*

In 2007, Jane files for divorce. She sues for full custody and you don’t fight it. People keep telling you they’re sorry, but all you feel is relief. Your hotel room is blessedly quiet, and there’s no one there for you to hurt.

*

In 2014, you get yourself a Facebook.

You’re pretty late to the party. You never really saw the appeal. You’re busy out there in the world, doing things, making waves, having adventures! You’re not a sit-on-the-computer and post photos type of guy! But then you hear some friends talking about reconnecting with old flames, and you nearly stop in your tracks, frozen by realization.

With trembling fingers, you type in his name. 

And there he is.

He’s older. There’s actually some muscle definition around his shoulders, and his face is even sharper and leaner than it was when you were seventeen together. You remember running thumbs over his cheekbones and your heart seizes up.

You click on his name.

His profile is private. You need to be friends with Dirk Strider to see his status updates and his other photographs.

Your cursor hovers over his name for a good five minutes. But you can’t do it. God help you, but you just can’t. You keep playing that first conversation over in your head. What will he say? And what will _you_ say?

Or, worst of all, will he just say nothing at all, and the two of you will just be silent Facebook friends, ships passing in the night?

That’s worse than nothing, you think.

You delete your Facebook account. Honestly, you’re too damn old for it.

*

In 2019, you make another account. You go back to his page. It’s still private, but now you can see his banner photo at the top. He’s got his arm around a guy, a really nice-looking, smiling guy. He’s smiling, too.

You think that, maybe, he looks happy.

So…

Okey dokey, then.

*

And after that, you tell yourself to stop fantasizing about reconnecting with him. To stop thinking about the summer of 1996. To just put him out of your mind entirely. Because in the end, you made your choices. You broke _his_ heart, because it was easier than breaking Jane’s, and if you ended up with nothing, it’s only what you deserve.

You build a little box in your mind, and you fold up all your memories of Dirk Strider, and you put them gently into that box, and then you close it, lock it, and do your best to tuck it away.

For good.

*

You’re browsing the VHS tapes in a pleasantly run-down Blockbuster Video when you see him again.

For a second, you think he’s a vision, or a dream. Your subconscious is brewing up a sight you want to see, is all. But that’s not how things work here, and when you blink and you shake your head and you look again, he’s still there, lanky and tall and ginger.

He’s still there.

You freeze in place, a beat-up rental copy of Pulp Fiction hanging pitifully in your sweaty hands, and you just stare at him, looking just like he did the first time you saw him on the slopes of the Rockies, only less covered in dirt and much more devastatingly, heart-pulverizing familiar.

“Dirk,” you breathe quietly.

And as if he heard you, he turns and meets your eyes.

For a second, there’s an electric sizzle between you. His eyes widen. Your heart completely stops beating. You’re encased in ice, frozen in time, the both of you caught up in a perfect moment where everything is possible.

“Jake?” he asks, loud enough that you can hear him. But even if he whispered it, you think you could have read his lips, or just… sensed it.

The copy of Pulp Fiction hits the floor. You take a step toward him.

And then the clock strikes midnight, and you wake up somewhere else.

It’s 2049, and you just saw Dirk Strider again, back in 1996.

  



	2. it's cold; it feels like independence day

  


A week later, you get another shot at it.

You’re back in 1996, and you run full tilt through the streets. Lights flash, signs dazzle, music blares. You push past people in flannel sweaters, chunky shoes, and flare jeans, jostling and shoving, nearly bowling some over. Your eyes focus with intensity on the big blue and yellow ticket stub, and then you’re back in the Blockbuster video.

He’s waiting for you.

He’s wearing a loose black tank top and ripped jeans and scuffed Nikes, a flannel jacket tied lazily around his waist. He’s leaning up by a row of videos, arms crossed and one foot flat against the wall. You get the feeling he’s posed himself like this on purpose, presenting a calculated show of casual ease. But when you walk in, he falters, arms falling to his sides and a flash of something you can’t recognize in his eyes.

You never were very good at reading people’s emotions.

“Dirk,” you say.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hi,” you reply, breathless.

“You came back.” His voice is soft in a way you remember from being curled up in his sleeping bag, his breath stirring the hairs by your ear. “Wasn’t sure…”

His mouth twists and he looks down. You gulp and glance away. There’s a gaggle of girls browsing the Disney shelf and a group hanging out by the cash. A few loose stragglers and couples read the backs of VHS cases. Some of them shoot covert looks your way. People always do like a show.

You take a step closer to him.

“There’s so much I want to --” you start.

He looks up. He’s close enough you can pick out individual freckles spattered across the bridge of his nose. “Want to go somewhere?”

You nod so hard your noggin starts to spin. “Yes, yes, hell yes.”

He’s got a car parked around the side. It’s a ‘92 Toyota Camry in that godawful light bronze colour that was so popular back in the day. Just seeing the thing makes you think of being sixteen again, back when life had seemed so full of adventure and glory and possibility. It makes your chest sore.

“Get in,” he says, throwing open the door and dropping into the driver’s seat. You hurry to obey, sliding in beside him.

You’re pulling out of the lot when you remember the rules of how this place works.

“You’ve got --” You swallow. “Is this your car?”

“Yep,” he says.

“Oh,” you say.

You look out the window, heart thudding in your chest. You haven’t seen him in fifty years. He’s not a part of your real daily life. He lives in your memories, your regrets, and your dreams. There’s no part of him that you own, and so there’s nothing about him for you to lose.

So why do you feel such a sense of loss?

You watch him drive, watch his profile against the passing lights of the street. You swallow a couple of times, blink away wetness in your eyes.

“You’re… full time, then,” you say.

“Yeah.”

Yeah. Yeah, of course he is. The rules of this place are pretty simple. Only full-timers can actually own anything, actually build any kind of permanence, of life. Visitors like you have only got the trial package. Not feature complete.

You sniff and rub at your nose.

“What... what happened?”

His mouth tightens and he shakes his head. “Cancer,” he murmurs, hands tightening on the wheel. “Pancreatic. Real aggressive.”

You nod. You keep nodding, because you don’t know what to say. You’re still nodding as the two of you drive beyond the city limits, leaving the lights behind. You blow past a sign illuminated with blue and red lights, blending purple shadows. _Now leaving Westonville,_ it reads. There’s a yellow smiley face under it. Don’t worry. Be happy.

You drive along the highway. Corn and soybeans grow to either side of the road, passing in rows. The great midwest, with its gently rolling hills and skies that go forever. A million stars light up the sky. It’s been ages since you saw the stars, with light pollution being what it is in 2048. You roll down the window and hang yourself halfway out, head lolling back. You reacquaint yourself with Orion’s Belt and the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia and Ursa Minor. The wind rushes through your hair, and you feel so young and strong and fit and _alive_.

You pull into a long driveway and stop in front of a small, cozy looking farmhouse. Dirk turns the car off and you climb back into the shotgun seat. Neither of you open your door.

“You were waiting for me,” you say eventually. You feel a little shudder of excitement at the thought, and shake your head. “I waited all week. I hoped -- I hoped, I sure did hope, Dirk, but I don’t think I actually thought…”

He shrugs and looks away, but you see colour in his cheeks. “Not much else to do, when you’re here full-time.”

The reminder is painful. You look away.

You have a whole lot of questions you want to ask. A mountain of them, as many as there are stars in the fucking sky. They tumble all over each other, get tangled up, mixed in, confused. How long have you been here, Dirk. Why Westonville. Why 1996. Did you ever get married? Did you ever have any kids? Did you go to Princeton, did you graduate with your PhD in philosophy like you wanted, or did you go into robotics or art or history, and what about your brother, how is he, and who was the bloke in that photo on your Facebook in 2019, did you and him stay together, and, and, and,

Did you have a good life?

Were you ever happy again, Dirk Strider, or did stupid Jake English and his thoughtless cruelty wreck it all for good?

In the end, that’s what all the questions come back to, and so you close your eyes and just sit there, because to ask any of them is to ask all of them.

But eventually, the silence is worse than the questions. The weight of them is piling up on you, growing exponentially, and you think that you might actually be crushed to death under their bulk if you don’t say something.

You open your mouth.

“Dirk, about that summer --”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he says. His voice is hoarse and rough and intense.

“Oh,” you say.

“What I _do_ want is for you to come inside and fuck me the way you used to. Think you can handle that?”

Oh, boy howdy.

So you do. You fall into bed with him, leaving ripped and discarded clothes in your wake. You kiss him harder than you can remember kissing anyone _but_ him, swallowing every sound he makes. You run calloused thumbs over sensitive nipples, drinking in his moans. You bite at his neck and his lips and his ears, sharp enough to make him cry out. You lift his legs over your shoulders and you drive into him with long, smooth, even strokes, thumbing the head of his cock all the while. You’ve learned a hell of a lot of tricks in fifty plus years and he’s as receptive as he ever was.

He howls when he comes, his voice scraping out of his throat like it’s escaping a bear trap. You bury your face in the crook of his neck when you join him.

You stay like that, tangled together, breathing hard, for what feels like forever. Occasionally, you nuzzle at his collarbones or nip at his chin or kiss at his neck. His fingers run lazily up and down your back.

You think you should say something, but he doesn’t seem to expect it, and it’s a blessing to not have to deal with it. Any of it. You just let yourself enjoy this. Being in 1996, with Dirk Strider, pretending that things hadn’t gone so wrong between you.

You’re watching the clock radio when it ticks over to midnight, and then you wake up.

You’re not strong and fit and virile. You’re a weak old man, and you’re alone except for the nurse. She’s smiling apologetically as she removes your digital EEG electrodes.

“Did you have fun, Mister English?” she asks.

“Sure did,” you say. You lean your head back in your chair.

*

Another week passes, and then you meet him at the Blockbuster. He’s parked around the side, and you wordlessly get into his car. The two of you cruise along the plains, painfully silent, until you reach his farmstead.

He gets out, shuts his car door. You follow him.

This time, you fuck him slowly, your forehead pressed tightly against his, rocking into him with the steady, relentless rhythm of the ocean. He gets louder and louder the closer and closer he gets, until he’s crying out with every thrust, fingers clutched in your hair, ankles locked behind your hips, arching to meet you every time you move. He shatters around you in orgasm moments before the clock strikes midnight and your carriage turns back into a pumpkin.

*

It goes like this. Your few attempts to engage with him more than in this one, specific way are rebuffed, and in all honesty, you’re glad. More than that. You’re deliriously _happy_. This is what you wanted. To _have_ him without having to deal with any of it. You don’t have to think back to the night when you probably ruined both of your lives. You don’t have to wonder what happened to him, since. You don’t have to think about what happened to _you._

You can just be with _him_ , his presence, his body. You live in those moments, feeling his touch and his warmth and reliving the summer of 1996 in all of its glory. It’s all you need, and you’re glad you don’t have to give or receive anything more.

And then that begins to lose its appeal.

Or rather, you start to remember just what made that summer so special. The way you complete each other when you’re deep inside of him and sucking the breath out of his lungs, that was part of it. But so was staying up all night talking. So was sharing hopes and dreams. So was working side by side, competing and making each other better all the while. It wasn’t just his body. It was him, all of him, and you’re beginning to think that maybe this thing you have going in a farmhouse outside Westonville isn’t heaven at all, but a kind of eternal purgatory where you get everything you thought you wanted and realize that, once again, as always, you were just a short-sighted, cowardly idiot.

*

In the space between one of these weeks, while you’re staring out the window and rehearsing a dozen different ways to try and breach his walls and reconnect in a way that has any _meaning_ , Jane calls.

“Are you getting anything out of that nostalgia therapy service, Jakey?” she asks.

For a second, you think she knows. You feel a surge of guilt, like you’re cheating on her, even though you two split back before you were even thirty and never should have tied the knot in the first place. It’s the strangest darn thing, because you’ve had scores of lovers since after the divorce was signed, and more than one before. 

But there’s something about this, about him, about hearing her voice on the other end of what is essentially a phone line, that takes you all the way back to 1996.

“I really am,” you tell her.

She hmms. You can hear her fingernails tapping along the table. You know the question she wants to ask. She knows you don’t want to talk about it. The two of you play chicken from a thousand miles away, and then she sighs.

“The kids want to come up and visit next week,” she says. “Will you have time?”

Your grandkids have gotten it into their heads that their children should know the family patriarch. You hate it when they visit. You never know what to say. The generation gap is so massive. There’s nothing you can talk about.

And you hate being seen like this, the way you are now. Helpless. Weak. You once wrestled tigers in the wilds of Russia, and now...

But you can’t say no. You’re the same man you always have been, and just smiling and nodding is the path of least resistance.

“That’d be aces, Janey,” you say.

*

This time, when you meet him in the parking lot of the Blockbuster, he’s not waiting behind the wheel. He’s sitting on the hood, leaning back, arms behind his head. You stop in your tracks when you see him. You’d just been on autopilot. Meet him in the lot, drive to his farmhouse, and fuck him hard enough that it might somehow communicate how sorry you are for all you’ve done. This deviation from the script sets the whole thing off its axle, and you just stand there, staring at him, stymied.

His tank top has ridden up a bit, baring his midriff. You can see the sharp bones of his hips and pelvis, the indent of his navel, the light dusting of hair. Mesmerized, you just stare until he seems to sense your presence and sits up, turning in your direction.

You make eye contact.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hi-ho,” you reply, licking dry lips.

He shakes his head. You see a hint of a smile on his lips for a moment, and then it’s gone. 

“I’m thinking,” he says, swinging down off the hood of the Camry. “I want to do something different, tonight.”

This is what you wanted, isn’t it?

He’s talking. He’s looking at you. It’s something other than wordless, painfully intimate sex.

But god help you, you’re frigging _terrified_.

“Different?” You sound strangled.

He runs a hand through his hair. “Ever miss the internet?”

You wrinkle your nose, thinking about it. “Kinda hard to miss it, isn’t it? Lordy, it’s everything, everywhere, and if it isn’t internet, it’s stratonet. Hell, aren’t we technically sort of in the internet right now?”

“Yeah. Right. Exactly. Back in the day, getting online felt like a thing, you know? Opening a portal to something beyond where you were. Hearing the phone line scream bloody fucking murder and opening your browser -- Netscape, of course -- was a fuckin’ _event_ , you know? There’s no magic out there. Everything’s connected. You think about a thing, just imagine it, and it’s there. No portal, no magical doorway, just instant access. Have you never thought about it?”

You take a second to consider that. You remember angelfire and geocities. The official website for Space Jam. Checking your hotmail account. Spending all afternoon on AIM and tying up the phone line. Hell, what even was your screenname again? You remember a hell of a lot of Xs and underscores! You think about trying to muffle the sound of the dial-up screeching so you could log onto the family PC at half past midnight without alerting your grandmother. You remember typing “boobs” into AltaVista and looking behind you to make sure no one had witnessed your transgression.

You grin and rub at the back of your neck.

“Well, okey doke,” you say. “I guess you’re not tilting windmills with that one. You’re right. It _did_ used to feel like a big ole how-do-you-do, didn’t it?”

He smiles faintly. “Wanna relive the magic?”

He takes you to an internet cafe. The computers are massive and chunky, with huge CRT monitors and clackety-clack keyboards with keys that come a full six centimetres off the frigging board. You sit together and construct your own geocities pages using obnoxious transparent borders and flashing badly compressed gifs as background images. You both laugh and joke and it’s as easy to poke fun at the Web 1.0 design as it is to miss it. He’s right. This used to be a new frontier, a vast wild unknown, and now it’s as paved over as anything gets.

The clock on the old Win 95 taskbar reads 11:47 when Dirk leans back in his old swivel-backed computer chair and knits his hands together behind his head. He looks far away. There’s a little stitch between his eyebrows. He used to get that, looking at the stars. You used to kiss it and then kiss him until he forgot to worry.

“You know,” he says, wistful and soft, a thousand miles away, up in space with the tourists and the brave colonists and the eternally questing science geeks. “You know, I think I must have replayed that night in my head half a billion times. That’s not an exaggeration, it’s a formula. A billion seconds is thirty one years, and every waking moment since that day, I’ve been just…”

You’ve practiced this conversation. You’ve practiced it so many times you’ve got a frigging flowchart up in your skull for knowing what to expect. But every single time, you put together an approach, like you were stalking stags in the north of England, and somehow, you never put together a plan of attack for if _he_ was the one who raised the issue.

And you just… freeze.

It’s a seventeen car pile-up in your brain. All your carefully put together maps and spreadsheets are obliterated, pieces flying everywhere. Without them, you don’t know what to do.

Eventually, he sighs. He sits back up, and he looks into your eyes.

“Why?” he asks, with so much hurt and desperate longing in his voice that you rock backwards like you’ve been shot. “That’s all I want to know, really. I just… want to understand _why_ , Jake.”

You tremble under the weight of the question, with the importance of not saying the wrong goddamn thing, like you always do. The easy thing is to just say ‘sorry, we were kids, it was stupid, but I was seventeen.’ And you always reach for the easy thing. But that’s what started this whole mess, this downslide that derailed your whole freaking life and lead you to this place so you can’t do what you always do, you can’t take the easy way.

You bite your lip. You feel tears prickle at your eyes. You draw in a shuddering breath.

“Because,” you say. “Because I was a stupid fucking _coward_ , Dirk, because Jane was there, and Jane was easy, and it was 1996 and things were still hard and complicated and I bought into all of it and I, I, and Dirk, I --”

Time’s up.

You’re old and you’re feeble and your legs don’t work and your nurse looks at you with concerned eyes. “Mister English, are you all right?”

You blink away tears and force a smile up at her. You try not to think of Dirk left alone in that empty lab with your Geocities websites and your piss-poor abortion of an explanation for what you did.

“Just overcome with the nostalgia of it all,” you say. “It’s amazing, what technology can do.”

*

You don’t think he’s going to be in the Blockbuster parking lot again. You really don’t. You had your second chance to do things right, and that should be it.

But he’s there, waiting for you.

You slide awkwardly into the passenger’s seat. He adjusts the rearview mirror. You try out a dozen different phrases in your head, but you don’t vocalize any of them and he doesn’t act. He turns the key in the ignition, and he turns the old Camry out of town.

You lean your head against the window as Westonville fades into farmland, aching with the desire to find the password that will magically dissolve all the sticky threads between you. You should say something. Say something. Say _anything._ Because if you don’t, things are just going to go back to how they were, and you can’t stand that.

“Why Westonville?” you ask.

He swivels his head in your direction, blinking in surprise, before turning his gaze back to the road.

It’s the first time either of you have talked in this car since the first night.

Eventually, he shrugs. “I tried some of the others. I don’t know. Westonville felt right. Quiet. Intimate. Familiar.” He glances in your direction again. “I lived in the midwest for twenty-five years, you know.”

“Oh,” you say. You didn’t know. You’d assumed he’d stayed in Texas, because he’s spent fifty years frozen in your mind exactly the way he was the night you last saw him.

“Central Illinois, mostly. Had a job there from ‘06 to ‘28. Paid well. I got to semi-retire pretty young and just focus on hobby work.”

“What kind of job?” you ask.

“Software development,” he replies.

“Not philosophy?”

He barks a surprised laugh, and then shakes his head. “Uh, yeah. No. I got as far as half a Master’s on that one. I liked it at the earlier levels. Honestly, I did. But dude, the higher up you climb on that ladder the more obtuse and recursive it gets. I had this image of all these free thinkers unlocking the secrets of the human condition and instead I just ended up swirling a fucking infinite toilet bowl of people picking apart the minutiae of Kant. One night, I was writing this paper focusing on just this one tiny passage in Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics and I just had this fucking epiphany all of a sudden. Like. What the fuck am I doing? Who is this going to help? What is this navel-gazing esoteria even _for_?”

He stops all at once. He goes quiet. You think he realized just how much he was talking. Maybe he even feels embarrassed. You remember the way he used to blush when he caught himself rambling, and how you’d reassure him that you loved to hear him talk until you coaxed him back out.

You try that.

“And you gave it up just like that? Threw in the old towel and never looked back? That doesn’t sound like you! You were always the man with the plan, back in the day.”

You see his mouth twist into an ugly curl before he looks out the side window. His fingers tighten on the wheel.

“It’s been a long time since then, Jake,” he says, and there’s a bite in his voice just sharp enough to make you flush and look down at your hands.

You imagine you’ve fucked everything up again, and that he’s just going to pull into his driveway and have you fuck him in silence again, but it’s only a minute or so before he talks again.

“You’re right, though,” he says with a sigh. “Had a plan. Of course I did. I enrolled in a Bachelor of CompSci the next day. I always liked computers. It was right after 9/11 and the dot com bubble had just burst, but I wasn’t looking to found a start-up or anything. I didn’t want to be Bill Gates. Just the guy who worked for him.”

“I bet you did pretty darn good there.”

“Like I said… got to retire early. So not bad.”

You don’t know where to go from there. It’s a natural bridging moment to new topics, but all the bridges are out with big ole DANGER signs pasted all over them. Marriage? Kids? Aggressive pancreatic cancer? You chew at your lip.

“Honestly,” he says, breaking the silence for you. You didn’t expect it, and you sit up a little straighter, surprised. “I feel I’m the one who should be asking you.”

“Asking me what?”

“Why you picked Westonville.” He taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “I toured a dozen other cities. Shaanti. Berkinghamshire. San Junipero. Those places seemed a lot more your speed.” He focuses straight ahead, but you see his shoulders tense up more and more. “Exotic locales with wild experiences.”

“I toured them, too,” you admit.

“Did you ever… do all that shit you talked about?” he asks. “Stalking panthers and hunting elephants and wrestling crocodiles?”

“Well,” you say. “As it turns out, elephants are endangered and actually in a pretty pickle because of people hunting them!”

He scoffs and shakes his head, but you think you hear him smile. “I told you that, you know.”

“It seemed far-fetched at the time!” You protest. You lean back in your chair, and you let yourself think back over the past fifty years. “I did, though. I did all of it. Swinging on vines in the wilds of Africa. Building houses in Haiti. Climbing Mount Everest. I fought a polar bear on an iceberg, when there were still either of those things around!”

“Polar bears were fucking man-eaters,” Dirk says doubtfully.

“So it’s a damned good thing I won!” you retort, and Dirk does laugh, outloud, some of the tension leaving his shoulders.

And then he goes quiet. He turns down the long drive down to the farmhouse. Then he asks: “What about Jane?”

Fifty years later, he still remembers the name of the girl you threw him over for. Your face burns as you slump down further in your chair, folding your arms over your chest. “I went on and married her,” you murmur.

Dirk nods slowly, his eyes locked on the road.

“We didn’t even last ten years.”

You see him close his eyes and take a deep breath. “Is it pathetic,” he murmurs, so quiet you have to strain to hear him, “if that makes me feel good?”

You sit up. “No, but it’s pretty darned uncouth,” you mutter.

“I don’t mean -- I don’t wish bad on you. Well. Sometimes I did. A lot of times I did. But I’m old, I’m done with that, it’s not that way, I just mean… I’m just, I’m glad you fucked it up with her, too. I’m glad the problem was you. And not me.”

He pulls the car to a stop. You’re in front of the farmhouse and he’s turning off the ignition.

You don’t want to go inside.

Sex is good. The sex between the two of you is _incredible._ But even at its very best, it can’t beat the way that you feel to actually just _talk_ to him again.

“It reminded me of you,” you blurt as Dirk’s hand goes for the door handle.

He freezes. “What?”

“Westonville. I know it’s not the same place, I know it’s not even _close_ , and I don’t know why it even did, it doesn’t make any darned sense, Dirk, but when I came to this place it just reminded me of -- of that summer. Of 1996. Planting in the Rockies. It’s barmy bloody nonsense and I know it, the midwestern plains reminding me of the Canadian mountains? But it’s not anything that makes sense, it’s a _feeling_. That’s why I’m here instead of Shaanti or San Junipero. Because it makes me feel close to you.”

He’s quiet for a long time.

“Come inside,” he says, finally. “Please. Goddammit, Jake, I don’t know how to process that, I really fucking don’t, and it’s quarter after eleven. You’ve only got forty-five minutes to make me come.”

You make him come in thirty, and then, in the silence afterward, he turns his face into your bare chest and sighs.

“You could have had me,” he whispers in the dark, his fingers gently turning circles in the fluffy hair on your sternum. “Fuck you. You wanted to feel close to me? I would have done anything you asked, that summer. I would have fucking died for you, Jake English. How am I supposed to deal with you chasing reminders of me fifty fucking years after you smashed me into the dirt?”

You hold him, not sure what to say, until he dissolves in your arms and you’re back in the real world, leaving the data servers of Westonville behind.

*

That week, Jane comes to visit you.

She doesn’t come with any offspring, the ones you share or the ones that are just hers. It’s just her, her heels clicking along the floor of your room. She always wears heels now, because she’s lost nearly half a foot of height in her old age, and she was never a very tall woman. Still, nobody would ever call her frail. Her red nails and lipstick and handbag all give off an aura of authority belied by her short curls of white hair and lined face.

“Hullo, Janey,” you greet her.

“Good morning, Jake,” she says. “Do you want to go sit in the gardens?”

You tell her that you do.

The two of you beat around the bush for about an hour. You get the feeling that she’s here for a specific reason, but she’s one of the few people you can stand to have see you like this, and the two of you really can reconnect and get talking without any effort at all. You wonder all the time if things between you would be better or worse if you hadn’t married her. You always did make better friends than lovers.

Finally, she folds her hands on the wrought iron table and leans forward. “You’re still doing nostalgia therapy?” she asks, all innocence.

You nod.

She nods.

You’re pretty sure you know why she’s here.

“My doctors shouldn’t be talking to you,” you say, sounding terse and petulant to your own ears. “Or are there not any friggin privacy laws left on this planet?”

“It wasn’t your doctor,” Jane shoots back. “It was the technician you tried to bribe into giving you an extra hour in the simulation, which is illegal.”

You roll your eyes and grumble and look off.

“ _Then_ I checked with your doctors,” she says, drumming her nails along the tabletop. “And I found out you’ve stopped all other therapy.”

“That’s true,” you say.

“They’re concerned.”

“I know.”

“ _I’m_ concerned.”

“I know, Jane.”

“You are never going to get better if you don’t --”

You feel a surge of helpless rage and you slam both hands down on the table. “Gosh fucking _darnit_ , Jane, I’m never going to get better at all!”

She sits back, surprised.

“You know it and I know it and all the darned frigging sawbones up in this place know it, too! I’ve had the best treatments money can buy, and it hasn’t done a damned thing! Maybe forgive a guy for looking forward to the five hours a week he gets to be the man he used to be, instead of pushing the ole boulder uphill, over and over, day after day, with no change and no --”

You have to stop talking, because at some point, you’ve cried your throat raw.

“Jake…” Jane murmurs.

You ball your hands into fists in your lap, choking around hiccups. You’ve never cared who sees you cry in your whole life, but right now, it just feels…

“You started the nostalgia therapy because you were depressed,” she whispers finally into the stillness. “And maybe it _was_ helping, but everyone says the same thing. You’ve got that look in your eyes, Jakey. That look people get when they want to escape from reality and go full-time.”

You fold your lips shut.

“You’re healthy. You could live forty more years.”

Live for what?

You don’t say it.

“Promise me you’re not going to lose yourself in that place. It’s not real, Jake. You’re in a graveyard full of lingering ghosts, and you’re still alive. Please, please promise me you’re not going to give up on life so you can die and go live in a computer simulation.”

“We’re not married anymore,” you say. “You don’t have to take care of me.”

“I know,” she says. “But who else is going to?”

*

Dirk drives the two of you out of town again, but he pulls off the road well before the long driveway to his farmhouse. The Camry chugs as he goes off road and parks in a recently cleared cornfield. An abandoned tractor sits nearby, watching like a rusted sentinel, as Dirk climbs out of the driver’s seat and gets up on the hood. After a moment, you follow.

He scoots over to let you climb up beside him. You lean back, throw your hands behind your head. The two of you stare up at the stars together for long enough that you start to sync into one another’s breathing.

“How about you. Did you ever tie the old knot?” You breathe the question into the chilly autumn air.

“Nah,” he replies.

“Oh,” you say.

After a minute, he adjusts so that he’s leaning against you, his head pillowed against your shoulder. His hair tickles your neck and chin. “I haven’t lived like a monk, or anything,” he says. “I’ve had boyfriends.”

“Serious ones?”

“A few,” he says. You think of the bloke in his Facebook banner photo. “I fell in love a couple of times. I was with one guy for eight years. That’s as far as I ever got, though. Mostly, I just had hook-ups. Lots and lots and lots of hook-ups.”

You feel a surge of competition at that. “I’ve had some wild nights in my day, myself, there, buddy!” you boast, poking him in the shoulder.

“Yeah, I figured,” he says, elbowing you. “Sometime between 1996 and now you _actually_ learned to give a decent fucking blow job, and I figured you weren’t practicing on bananas.”

You flush, but you can’t help but feel a bit proud at the faint praise. You give a decent blow job. That’s a nice thing for a fellow to hear.

“But, yeah.” He settles back in at your side. “I never managed to hack it. I’d always… get real clingy. Paranoid, jealous. Controlling. I’d wake up every morning thinking that today was the day he was gonna leave me, and go to bed pretty sure I’d only just managed to get him to put it off until tomorrow. And then, when any of the poor dudes actually tried to be romantic and vulnerable to comfort me, I’d just…” He shrugs against you. “Shut down, close up. None of that’s really conducive to anything lasting.”

It’s kind of him, not to draw the obvious line right back to you. The first guy he ever dated, when he was fragile and open-hearted, who’d broken his heart in two and left him empty. He doesn’t have to leave your name out of the account, but he does, and that’s real keen of him.

“I have a kid,” you say, because you want to offer something back. “We’re not close. We never were. He kind of hates me, I think, and it’s pretty darned fair of him.” You pause, not sure if you want to admit the most fucked up part of your life, but if anyone deserves it, it’s Dirk. “The thing is, you know, I never -- I never made the effort. I didn’t want to. I couldn’t handle it. Couldn’t handle him. Jane and I, we never would have lasted one way or the other, but he sped it along, and that’s on me. It’s _all_ on me. I never should have been his dad, and I knew it, too. I didn’t want kids, but it just… seemed like the thing to do.”

“Fuck,” Dirk says, and pushes away from you, jumping off the hood. You sit up to watch him pace, uncomfortably reminded of that night back in the real 1996 when things had gone bad.

“That’s how it was with me, and with Jane, too, wasn’t it?” he finally asks, looking up at you. You can see his eyes glinting in the dark, catching starlight. “I get it. I finally fucking get it. I spent… god, I’ve spent all these years thinking, what’s wrong with me? What did I fuck up? How did it go wrong? But the whole time, you were always going to go back and marry your girlfriend because it was fucking 1996, gay shit was still off the table entirely, and settling down was just ‘the thing to do.’”

You swallow convulsively around a lump. “Yeah,” you say, and then. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

He shakes his head. “Yeah. Okay. I think I’m ready to hear that, now, but I’m nowhere close to being ready to accepting it. I don’t forgive you, Jake English.” He walks back, and you scoot away, ready for him to get back into the car, but instead, he jumps back up on the hood with you and kisses you greedily, hungrily, with teeth and tongue.

He peels off your clothes piece by piece, kissing your lips and cheeks and neck and shoulders and chest and stomach. He goes down on you, rough and demanding, pushing your hands away when you try to thread them into his soft hair. He pushes you back onto the windshield, splaying a hand against your chest to keep you there.

He spits into his hand and strokes you before guiding you into him and riding you right there under the stars.

It starts out slow and methodical, but before too long, he’s losing himself to it. You can only watch his eyes close, his features clench, his teeth catch his lip for so long before you’re sitting up, arms wrapping around him, pulling him tight and bucking up into him. Dirk’s breath is rough and harsh against your ear, his hands clutching and scratching at your back, his cock hot against your abdomen. You grunt and huff like an animal while the Camry squeaks and groans underneath you both, lurching on its struts and shocks. For once, you come first, and Dirk swallows your cries before working himself off while you lay back, panting, drenched with sweat, against the windshield.

He comes with a shout, spattering your chest.

He sits there, on you, straddling you like a saddle, and both of you stop panting enough that you can hear crickets and cicadas sing all around you in the darkness.

“Dirk,” you whisper.

“Don’t,” he says. But his long fingers don’t stop stroking the dusted hair of your chest and stomach.

You swallow. You nod. You rub his hip-bones with your thumbs and watch him and the two of just breathe until midnight.

He doesn’t say anything, and you know you don’t _deserve_ anything. But he doesn’t leave you, doesn’t push you away.

It’s not nothing.

  



	3. i think of death, it must be killin' me

  


He doesn't pull away after that night under the stars. If anything, he opens up more and more, barriers breaking down.

You fall into a sort of routine.

You meet him at the Blockbuster and drive. You make new memories in new locations. The loft of an old, rundown barn. The parking lot of an abandoned Walmart. Hotel rooms. Lakesides. You always have sex, and it’s always good, but now it comes with hours of conversation. You reconnect to his life, bit by bit. You interface with his history, with the boyfriends he loved and left, with the jobs he had, the places he lived, the projects he worked on. You fit yourself into the little changes in his personality. He’s not the same Dirk he was in the summer of 1996, but you’re not the same Jake, either, and there’s a lot to relish in discovering and melding into all the changes.

You ask questions, and he answers. His answers are comprehensive, satisfying, and always make you feel something, whether you’re laughing or fighting back tears at the end. For his side of things, he’s a lot more shy about the asking, and you don’t think you’re nearly as good at the answering, but he really does seem genuinely curious about your life, and you like to think you have some real good stories.

Both of you try to make it all count. There are a lot of years to catch up on, and only five hours a week to do it in.

*

One night, while the two of you are lying tangled up in his bed, he asks the question you thought would never come up.

“It’s October 2049, right?”

“Right,” you say.

“Okay. Thought so. I’ve been doing some math. That makes you seventy. And that’s too young. They don’t let people in for end of life palliative until you’re at least eighty-eight. And they’re strict about it. Even though the vast percentage of each server’s population is uploaded full-timers, interfacing living consciousnesses through the system is about ninety-five percent of total server load. It’s an insane fucking strain, so nobody gets to come here just to hang out because they’re old and bored.”

You say nothing.

“Two exceptions. One, terminal illness. Gotta preview the service for those about to kick it, after all. Make that paper. And two… the kind of bone-deep bullshit depression that all the meds, EEG stimulation, and talk therapy on earth can’t provide. Nostalgia therapy, they call it. Remind you of being young, recapture the joie de vivre.

“I’m curious,” he asks. “Which are you?”

You don’t want to talk about this. Don’t want to admit this. But Dirk deserves pretty much anything he asks for that you can give him, and plenty that you can’t.

When you find your voice and remember how to talk, you honestly sound pretty calm. “You know, Dirk, I wish I could show you the snaps of some of the stuff I’ve done. Swimming with sharks, climbing the Great Pyramids at Giza, white water rafting in Zimbabwe… hell, I’ve been over Niagara Falls in a freaking barrel!"

He hums quietly in the dark, a little sad. "All the shit you said you'd do."

"And then some!"

He's quiet, waiting for your explanation. He trusts you to segue this into something coherent, and you swallow around a lump in your throat. He deserves to have your honesty, even if you don't want him to. Even if you're terrified he won't look at you the same way.

"I've done all the most bonkers, most perilous, most witless feats this planet has to offer and laughed in the face of it all, so -- so how fucked up is it, how freaking meaningless does it make the damn world that after all that, I broke my back from running too fast down a flipping _hill_? Just a hill, just a fucking hill! Barely even an incline! Foot caught a root, I flipped bum over skull and then I’m laying there thinking I should be in hells of pain but can’t feel a damn thing."

Dirk's stopped breathing. "Jake..."

You push on, teeth gritted. "Next thing I know, doctors are telling me that I’m a bad candidate for nerve growth, but they try it, and it doesn’t work, so they try digital nervous enhancement and they try comprehensive restructuring and they try fifteen flipping separate surgeries and they try _everything_ , but I never even feel a twinge down past my midsection, no matter what they try.”

You close your eyes and turn into him, wrapping both arms and legs around him in an act of pure defiance. Your digital self uploaded here in Westonville has all the strength and vitality and function your physical one doesn’t. Is it any wonder you're not stoked about being 'cured' and going back into the real world?

“They all tell me I’m healthy!" You can't keep the bitterness from your voice. "I’m healthy and fine and hale and only seventy! So I’m supposed to just keep on trucking and hell, Dirk, I can’t even get hard out there in the real world, in my stupid body, but they just keep saying that I’m healthy! So I just gotta keep on living, for nothing and nobody, when there’s a perfectly good eternity to be spent over here with my legs and my dick and you.”

“Don’t talk like that,” Dirk says, sharp.

You go still against him, surprised by the whipcrack of his voice snapping over you.

“Life --” he stops short, goes quiet, and then sighs and squirms out of your arms. You see his silhouette rise from the bed, his ass flexing with every step until he drapes it with a robe. He goes to the big, eastern facing windows, leaning one arm against the glass and staring out into the night.

“Life’s worth something,” he says. “And I sure fuckin’ wish I had more of it. Back when I was miserable, even, but now -- especially now. Especially now that...” He shakes his head.

You sit up in bed, sheets falling around you. You want to press him on what changed, what made him stop being miserable. Is it you? Is he happy that you’re back? Does he want life back to spend it with you, even after what you did?

But instead, you just stick your foot in it.

“Did it hurt?” you ask softly. “Dying?”

“Still hurts,” he murmurs, or at least, you think he does. He turns back to you. “I don’t want to -- I don’t want to talk about that. Just stop taking what you have for granted, don’t do that, don’t fucking talk like that. See how you feel once your days really are numbered, and --”

He cuts _himself_ off by climbing into your lap and kissing you, and you luxuriate in the feeling of his weight on your legs.

When he pulls away, he presses his forehead to yours and rubs the back of your neck with his long fingers and you hear him swallow hard.

“Look, I’m sorry about your legs. For you, for a guy like you, that must be…” He shakes his head. “But don’t talk like that, okay? Don’t fucking say that shit. I’ve been there. Knowing death is coming, counting down days. It’s not something to think about. Westonville will still be here, with your legs and your dick and… the rest. Okay?”

“... okay,” you murmur.

“Okay,” he says, and sighs with relief. “Okay.”

He kisses you again, and you can practically taste his reilef.

“Dirk,” you say when he pulls away again.

“What?”

“... I’m sorry. Not about -- well, yes, for sure, about being a dunderhead as usual, about always saying the wrong thing, about being a walking indiscretion. But I’m sorry, I’ll always be sorry, for what I did that summer.”

“Okay,” he says. “But I’m still not ready to forgive you. Not even a little. You fucked me up, Jake English. God, you fucked me up.”

You promise yourself you won’t ask about the cancer again, and you don’t.

*

The two of you actually go into the Blockbuster.

There are no prying eyes anymore. You look like either two friends or a pair of guys about to go neck in a car, rather than like a pair of long lost lovers about to get into a row. You're left to your business, to browse the collections of VHS tapes with freedom.

You make suggestions. Dirk scoffs and shakes his head, sometimes. Others, he kind of tilts his chin to one side and narrows his eyes at you, as if he's not sure if you're pulling his leg or not. He approves of Fargo, Reservoir Dogs, Trainspotting, and Being John Malkovich. He looks pained at Independence Day, Braveheart, and The Matrix. He tries to draw you into a discussion about the genre-savviness of Scream and whether or not it earns the right to succumb to some of the very cliches it calls out and also how fascinating it is that it, in turn, created an entire new generation of slasher flick blah blah blahdy blah, and you glare at him until he finally stops talking and you tell him how much you love the phone call scene. He sighs.

He looks outright frigging wounded when you pick up Titanic.

"Uh-uh," he says, holding up his hands. "No way. No fucking way. Cameron can do some decent action-shlock, sure, and he can frame a shot, but I refuse to sit through three fucking _hours_ of maudlin melodramatic bullshit just for Rose to not let Leo get up on the goddamn plank with her."

"Oh, no," you say, planting your feet. "Oh, no, you didn't just turn that corner, mister! That's gotta be just about the oldest and coldest take there is! Gee Willikers, now, that bit was tired and played out back in 2014! How can you not be moved by this film unless you're just playing at being too good for it?"

"Because it's shallow, manipulative dreck with well timed musical cues acting as replacement for any actual emotional depth," he retorts, folding his arms.

"You!" You shake a finger in his face accusingly. "You just went into it with a hardened heart! You hate romance!"

All at once, the life goes out of him, and he slumps. He looks away. "Whatever," he says. "Add it to the pile."

"Did..." You step closer, looking around, hoping no one is watching and thinking you just did something untoward. "Did I say something wrong?"

"No. Well. No, not just now, but fucking --" He growls. "Check the copyright date on the fucking box, dude, and you might have an idea of why I wasn't really feeling cupid's arrow prick my heart and reduce me to weeping when I saw this time."

You flip the box over, but you already know what you're going to see. (C) 1997.

"All their rambling about forever and always and love and..." he shrugs. "Kept wanting to shout at the screen. Jack, dumbass, are you actually falling for this shit. It's one thing on the fucking Titanic, sure, but the second you get back to real life, Kate Winslet is going to get tired of the subplot where she bangs the guy from steerage and you're gonna just be..."

He trails off, and he turns and walks away. Keeps walking. Right out the door.

Heart in your throat, you check out your giant stack of movies. You remind yourself not to panic, not to assume the absolute worst, not to start falling back on self-defensive contingencies, and lo and behind, he's waiting for you in the front seat of the Camry. He turns the car on and lets it idle while you climb into the front seat.

Later that night, you're curled up on the couch watching Toy Story, which Dirk reluctantly approves of, but only the first one, because almost all sequels not built into the original design are exercises in commercially motivated audience pandering rather than artistic endeavour or whatnot. You have your feet in his lap, and he's absently rubbing them, something he's started doing since he found out about your legs. You think if it were anyone else it would be patronizing or infantilizing, but with him it's just... nice. It's nice. Onscreen, Buzz and Woody are being acquainted with the horrors of Sid's house, but you're having a hard time staying focused on spider-legged doll heads. You're caught up thinking about Titanic.

"If..." you say, and then you stop, unsure of whether it's a good idea.

But his hands still, and he looks at you. "If what?"

You swallow. "If I could go back," you say, "if I could just rewind time and go back to that night and do it all over again, knowing what I know, I'd do it different. I would, Dirk. I would."

His shoulders tense and he focuses with purposeful intensity on the screen. You see his jaw working and his adam's apple bobbing. You can't look away from him. You need to know what he'll say, if he'll say anything at all.

Finally, he goes back to rubbing your feet, but with enough force that you wince as he pushes his thumbs into your tendons. "You can't, though," he says. "You can't rewind time, you can't undo it. You fucking..." He folds his lips tight. "I don't want to hear your fantasies of a reality where you get to _feel_ better about how bad you --"

"No!" You shouldn't interrupt, you know you shouldn't, but he's got it all wrong, is all. He's looking at the whole thing sideways. "No, it's not like that! I'd go back, I'd do it different, because it was a _mistake_. It was a mistake from moment flipping _one_ , you know? I should have been with you. I’ve spent all this time thinking about how bad I'd done it and how much I wanted to take it back and just _see_ you again, just _be_ with you!"

"But you _could_ have!" he shouts, throwing up his hands. "You fucking idiot, all you had to say was -- you _could_ have been with me, forever, always, but you --"

"Fucked it up," you say, quietly.

He's silent.

"I fucked it up, Dirk. I fucked it up so bad. And I -- maybe I'm just being self-pitying, just being my stupid pathetic self again, making it about me, but while I'm real sad I hurt you, I'm more sad that I wasted all those years we could have been together because I was just too damn scared."

He swallows hard. You watch his adam's apple bounce. And then, slowly, he begins rubbing your feet again.

"I like that better than just 'sorry,'" he says, finally. "It's... I don't know." He shakes his head. "I don't know, Jake. I wish -- I fucking just wish -- god. God, just watch the fucking movie."

*

But he changes, a bit. He doesn't get so withdrawn when something reminds him of what happened between you, all those years ago, and sometimes, every so often, he'll mention something about that summer with fondness in his voice instead of bitterness, and you feel like all your birthdays and Christmases have come at once.

*

You dial up Jane one day between one 1996 and the next. You lean back in your chair with your eyes closed waiting for her to pick up, tilting your head toward your earpiece like it’s the receiver of a phone. Old habits.

“Jake?” 

“Janey.”

“What’s wrong?”

Because of course, she can tell from your voice that something is on your mind.

“Janey,” you repeat. “I haven’t changed. I need to do something selfish to you, and you deserve a whole lot better.”

“How is this different from normal?” she asks, her voice light and teasing, but there’s a bit of an edge there, too, because she hasn’t changed, either.

“I fucked things all up with us, didn’t I?” you breathe.

She’s quiet for a bit. You hear her moving around. Papers shuffling.

“That’s debatable,” she finally responds. “You did your part, that’s for sure. If you were asking me twenty years ago, I’d be an eager beaver to heap it all at your feet. You were distant, you were avoidant, you were always so eager to find an escape to my life -- to _our_ life. And it got a whole lot worse after I was pregnant, and I don’t think I’ll ever stop blaming you for _that_. He did nothing wrong, after all. But… I think I did, a bit. I had my own flaws, Jake. Still do. I’m working on them.”

“Okay,” you say. “Okay.” How do you phrase this next part? How do you soften the blow of what a jerkwad you are? You come at it from different angles, and then just sigh and plunge in, because there’s nothing for it. “What did you want to hear me say, back then?”

You hear her go still. Quiet. And then sigh quietly. “Not so that you can actually say it to me, of course.” Her voice snaps along the line.

“No,” you admit. “It’s for someone else. Someone I… I hurt even more than you, but you’re the only one…” You swallow. “Gosh, Janey, this was a bad idea even with having warned you first, isn’t it? Haha. Look at me, making you --”

“There isn’t any kind of magic phrase, you know, Jake. That’s not how those things work. The perfect apology doesn’t heal heartbreak, disappointment, and loss. It doesn’t bring back wasted years or stem a tide of resentment.”

“But they can help,” you say.

She sighs. You hear her moving around again. “Who?” she asks. “Dare I hope it’s our son?”

“... no,” you reply, ashamed. It probably should be, but hell, you’re too old to even start unpacking that. “It’s just… someone I hurt, Janey. Someone I hurt real bad. Worse than you, even, because there was none of this shared blame. It was my fault. It was all my fault.”

“Maybe just that, then,” she suggests. “Maybe that’s enough. You always handle apologies one of two ways, Jake. Your whole life. It’s either, I’m sorry, but I had a really good reason, or I’m sorry and I’m a piece of garbage so please make me feel better. Making it about you. You were always good at making things all about you.”

That hurts, but you can’t say she’s wrong.

“If I could have had you just call me out of nowhere and say something,” she says, “I guess that’s it. I’m sorry, Jane. It was my fault. I know you tried and you did your best and it just wasn’t enough, and that’s on me, not on you.”

“But,” you say, unable to help yourself, “ _some_ of it was on you, you just admitted that much!”

“My god. And somehow, you never remarried. I’m hanging up on you,” she says flatly.

“Wait!”

Silence on the line, but not dead air.

“... I _am_ sorry,” you say. “And, and maybe not all of it, but a lot of it was my fault. I know that. I was a piss poor husband and a billion times worse as a dad.”

“I know,” she says quietly. “And we never should have gotten married to begin with, Jake, that’s the truth. But you know? It still feels good to hear.”

She leaves you deep in thought, waiting for your next trip to Westonville.

*

You and Dirk fill a plastic bag with penny candies at a gas station, and then spend the night sitting on the roof of the Camry in an empty corn field. You divvy up the loot and then eat Fuzzy Peaches and Sour Patch Kids, empty sleeves of Pixie Stix into your mouths and get your hands sticky from Push-Pops. You try to see who can cram more Warheads into their mouth in one go. This gets vicious. Both of you hate to lose. Dirk cries uncle first, but says it’s because you’re both getting mouth ulcers, and you’re silently more grateful for the reprieve than the victory.

When you’re down to wrappers and sticky hands and gummy tummies, you put your arm around him and you both lean back to look up at the stars, talking. You talk and talk, until there’s a lull, and you take a deep breath.

“I’m sorry,” you say.

“Mn?”

“For 1996. I --” You swallow the urge to lay into yourself, call yourself an idiot and a fool and say that Dirk should just give up on you altogether. You rein it in and you stay on target. “It was my fault. You didn’t do anything wrong, and nothing you could have done would have gotten through my stone-packed god damned noggin. I hurt you all on my own, and I’ll never forgive myself for it, and I’m so, so freaking sorry, Dirk.”

Not bad. You couldn’t resist a little bit of self-flagellation when it came down to it. Old dogs, new tricks.

Dirk tenses and you think he’s going to pull away. But he relaxes against you and moves to press his face into the crook of your neck, kissing against the flutter of your carotid artery.

“I’m not sure I can ever forgive you,” he says quietly. “I’m not even sure I can ever stop being fucking furious with you.”

You close your eyes. It’s not what you wanted to hear.

“Okay,” you say.

“I’m not done.”

You hold your breath.

“I would have spent forever… I would have… fuck, Jake. Fuck.”

“I know,” you say, squeezing your eyes shut. Moisture leaks out the sides.

“But we can’t go back, can we? You can’t teleport back to that night and fix it, and we all fuck up, and maybe it’s just easier when this place exists and I can be young and whole and healthy again, but…”

It’s quiet. Crickets chirp and cicadas sing. You hold your breath.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he says, quietly. “I’m glad I got to meet you again. I’m glad our paths crossed at the end. And I think, at this point, I feel all of that more strongly than how much I hate you. I don't forgive you, not one bit. But... I wouldn't trade you being here. Not for anything.”

And your heart flutters.

You hold him, and you nuzzle into his hair, and you drift off, sugar-drunk, and wake up in your bed at the home.

*

He tells you about his failed relationships. He blames them all on himself, but you can see through it and recognize that none of those guys were any more good for him than you were. None of them were ever ready for the complications of Dirk Strider. And you’re responsible, at least in part, for a whole lot of those complications, so you feel strangely protective of them. So what if he’s clingy? The boy’s been through some shit! Are you so perfect, Daniel?

Daniel is, you deduce, the guy from the Facebook photo. You tell Dirk that, and he looks confused, and you have to confess your occasional history of social media stalking, which leads into more confessions, and soon you’ve admitted to all the times you tried to find him and either failed, or succeeded and couldn’t handle the weight of him. Dirk looks profoundly affected by the knowledge, but you can’t tell if he’s furious, touched, just bemused, or some mighty potent combination of all three.

He never looked for you.

He says that he didn’t think he could handle _finding_ you.

And that’s fair.

You talk, you fuck, you drive. You kiss on the floor of his living room, you make love to him under the water of his shower, you lay awake until midnight strikes just pouring out your heart. The weeks outside, back in cold reality of your wheelchair and your dead legs and your Dirkless existence feel like purgatory, a wasteland of dead space between his freckled hands and warm eyes. Westonville is the real world. 2049 is a listless dream that only ends when you lay eyes on him and his Camry in the parking lot outside of the Blockbuster. There’s talk of taking you off nostalgia therapy -- you’re in too deep. It’s only making your depression worse. You’ve completely given up on physical therapy. But Jane’s next of kin, and she won’t agree to pull you off, and you have the money to keep paying.

It becomes routine, almost, but that’s the wrong word. There’s nothing routine about it. The trudge through the week always feels like the torments of hell, and the moment you lock eyes with him always makes your heart race. What it really feels is “comfortable,” in the best possible way. It feels like storm chasing, alligator wrestling, and Everest scaling, like your life, only now you don’t have the constant niggling reminder that Dirk isn’t in it.

There’s nothing in the world quite like it. You haven’t felt it since 1996.

Since you fell in love with him the first time.

*

And then you find him in the parking lot outside the Blockbuster. He’s pacing, wringing his hands, clearly agitated. When he hears you, senses you, something, he looks up, and meets your eyes, and his are wide and anxious and afraid.

“I fucked up, Jake, I fucked up, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” His voice is shaking, and you feel your comfortable new life shatter.

*

He’s quiet.

He pushes aside your questions, your panic, and climbs into the driver’s seat of the Camry. He sits there, looking stricken, running his hands through his hair, clutching his fingers around the wheel, opening and closing his eyes. Eventually, tired of trying to talk sense to him through the car door, you get on your side.

He peels out of the lot and speeds out into the country.

You drive in silence for just long enough that you start to _really_ panic, to full on hyperventilate there beside him, and then he speaks.

“Do you ever --”

He cuts himself off and is quiet again for a long time, but just the reassurance that he _intends_ to talk makes it bearable. You’re quiet, waiting. You don’t think there’s anything you could say that would make him open up, so you just let him take his time.

“I had this thing in my head,” he says, finally. You can’t help but notice that his knuckles are white on the wheel. “This fucking hang-up with turning fifty. It fucking terrified me. It was the goddamn symbol of mortality, that magic fucking number. I would go to bed as Brad Pitt and wake up as Brad Pitt as Benjamin Button. So I just... “ He shakes his head, laser focused on the road. “I started saying, in pretty much every non-perjury situation, yeah, I’m fifty. I was forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, telling people I was fifty. So then, when I finally actually did turn fifty, it wasn’t… it wasn’t such a big deal, you know? I’d been fifty for years. It couldn’t hurt me, couldn’t scare me. I’d already been saying it. Living it. I -- you know? You know what I mean?”

You don’t, not at all. Not even a little. It’s not something you would ever do. You remember being fifty and saying you were forty-five. Continuing to tell everyone you were forty-five until you got your first age spots on your hands and the gig was up. But you nod, because you think that’s what he wants to hear.

He nods too.

After another long silence, he flexes his fingers on the steering wheel, one by one, and sighs.

“I haven’t been miserable, you know,” he says.

“I know,” you say, not entirely sure what he means.

“It’s not like you left and then my life was bullshit. I had a good life. There are people I love so much that I --”

He stops, cutting himself off again, and then you drive silently again.

“The thing about cancer,” he says, “is that it's not just that you’re dying. It’s not just the knowledge of your clock counting down. It’s not just having to say goodbye to people, which is a hell of a lot harder then just up and fucking dying. It’s not just treatments, either, as much as those are a special kind of fucking torture.” He takes a deep breath, and it shudders.

You swallow.

“It’s the pain,” he continues after a long break. “It hurts, Jake. You can feel it inside of you, this invader, growing and corrupting, pressing against your bones, moving your organs aside, fucking you up, ripping you apart. All the time. All the goddamn time. You wake up because it hurts too much to sleep.. You can’t enjoy anything because all you feel is the pain, and you know that it’s not going to pass. It’s going to get worse, and worse, and worse, and then you’re going to be dead, and --”

The final pause lasts about five heartbeats. You feel like you can count them out, yours is thumping so hard.

“I’m not full-time,” he murmurs.

The needle on the record of your life jumps, scratches, and then catches.

“What?” you ask, dazed. You shake your head. “But… the car. The farmhouse. The --”

“I’m on about thirteen hours a day,” he interrupts. “Maybe a bit longer, when I can swing it, but I usually can’t, not without raising even more flags than I already do. Which could be all kinds of hells of trouble, and I can’t do that to her, except, fuck me, _fuck_ \--” he slams both palms against the wheel; the horn blares “-- fuck, I’ve already done that, haven’t I? Greedy fucking Dirk, always wants more, can’t just let things be, and now god only knows what kind of hell Rox has coming her way because I couldn’t just…”

Is this a dream?

You’ve had this dream before, you think. You’re with Dirk, and he turns to you, all smiles, and tells you that it’s all been a mistake, and he’s alive. There was no cancer, he was just punishing you, only now you’ve been punished enough and the truth is, he’s right outside your door.

You swallow.

It doesn’t feel like a dream. That’s the thing with Westonville and Sun Junipero and Shaanti and all the other servers where the dead and dying wander. That’s their power. They feel real.

“You…” You swallow again. “You’re… not dead?”

Your voice is quiet, pathetic, pleading. He shoots a quick look at you, and you see the expression of shock on his face before he looks back at the road and cloaks his emotion.

“It’s…” His jaw works silently. “It’s complicated, Jake.”

“You said you were dead.”

“I know. I know I did, but it wasn’t lying, not really, it wasn’t to deceive, it was that same thing. Saying I’m fifty, so fifty can’t hurt me. Calling me dead is just a -- exaggeration, because the cancer is as real as anything is. Terminal, aggressive, and ripping me apart from the inside out. What was the harm, having Rox introduce some rogue code? To have her keep me under? What was the harm, when I was going to be dead in five months and being alive, awake, out there, was just constant fucking _pain_?”

But he shakes his head, curses under his breath, balls up his hands.

“Except five months came and went. The pain stayed, the radiation and chemo and all of it, but six months, seven months, eight months. A year. Two. Everyone kept telling me how brave I was, what a fighter. I was just angry, honestly. More time alive, less time in the servers. I couldn’t understand why the fucking cancer wouldn’t just get on with it, but Rox kept making me swear I’d fight and not give up, so I didn’t, and then things started getting better, and now they have the fucking nerve to look me in the eye and say _total remission_?”

You’re barely breathing. “You _are_ alive.”

“Chemo, radio, it’ll all be out of me in a few months. And once it is, I’ve been assured, no more pain. I did it. I beat it. Cancer’s gone, and I’m not dead.”

“You’re not dead,” you repeat. It has a magical power that makes you light-headed.

He swallows. “I’m not dead,” he repeats, and this time, you hear a bit of wonder in his voice, too. Like he’s just letting himself find some joy in that gosh fucking damned fact.

“Shit,” you say, and then you turn bodily towards him. “Fuck! Dirk! Oh my jeezy creezy, you absolute madman, what’s wrong, then? You’re alive? You’re _alive _! What’s all this --”__

__“Rox got caught,” he says. The joy is gone, and now he looks ahead, blank and expressionless._ _

__“Rox,” you repeat._ _

__“Roxy Lalonde. My best friend, my rock, the magnetic north my entire life has been tied to, who helped build this entire system, who let me exploit it, helped me do it, exploited it herself, just to give me some relief from the pain. She got caught, and she’s in a world of trouble, and it’s _my fault_. I fucked up, Jake. I fucked up.”_ _

__“Yeah, but --”_ _

__“ _But?_ ”_ _

__“But… you’re not dead,” you say. “You’re not dead, Dirk. Holy toledo, you’re not dead._ _

__He tightens his jaw and nods._ _

__You drive in silence, past the farmhouse, past where you’ve ever been before. You start to see the same sights looping, like a cartoon from the 1960s, saving money. A sign declaring WINCHESTER CORN IS THE BEST THERE IS. A single cow alone in a clover-dotted field, its tail slapping its thighs. A run down barn so far in the distance it would be a real task to wade through the soybean fields to reach it._ _

__You’re well past the borders of Westonville. You’re not sure what happens if you keep driving -- probably nothing. Probably just more looping scenery. Maybe, eventually, you’ll just find yourself back in town, blasting at 110 past the movie theatre, the Blockbuster, the clubs, the record store, the net cafe. This place isn’t the kind of breakable that you can just glitch out by driving off into the night. Just the kind of breakable where, apparently, someone’s best friend can introduce some lines of code and let a guy who’s flippin’ _alive_ live like he’s full-time._ _

__“So…” There are so many things you want to ask and say and do and propose, but you don’t. You’re trying, you’re really, really trying, not to make everything about you. For once in your life. “What’ll happen to her?”_ _

__“I don’t know,” he says._ _

__“Is there… anything I can do?”_ _

__“I don’t know, Jake.”_ _

___Where are you living now? Is it somewhere accessible? How soon can I come see you?_ You swallow all of that down._ _

__“I really will. Do something, anything. If I can. I want to help. I want to be there for you, Dirk. I want to be whatever and do whatever you need.”_ _

__He shoots you a surprised look, eyes widened and lips slightly parted. It’s lickety split, lightning fast, and then he’s focused back on the road._ _

__“I don’t know,” he repeats, finally._ _

__You have to physically bite your lip to keep from asking all your questions. God, but he’s alive. God and Mary and Jesus. Fuck. He isn’t dead, he isn’t a ghost in this machine. He’s alive. Dirk Strider is still alive, out there, in the grey and meaningless world of flesh, which suddenly has a whole hell of a lot of meaning._ _

__“I need to disconnect,” he says suddenly. “I shouldn’t have stayed under this long. Not when all this is going on. Roxy needs me, and every second I’m on the servers is a second she’s going to be crucified for.”_ _

__“Wait,” you say. “Hold on, wait. You’ll be back, right? Next week, you’ll be back?”_ _

__“I don’t know,” he repeats again, only this time, it feels final. “I just -- I just needed to talk to someone, needed to… and you…”_ _

__He swallows. You want to throw yourself over onto him, kiss him, hold him, fuck him, do anything to make him stay and talk to you and help you process the crushing monumental truth of his continued existence._ _

__“I could always talk to you,” he murmurs._ _

__“You have to be here next week,” you say. Plead._ _

__“I’m sorry,” he says._ _

__He has the courtesy to pull the car over before, for the first time, he’s the one who winks out of existence, leaving you alone. You’ve always romanticized that moment in your head, because it was the only way to not hate it so much. But you feel the cold splash of reality wash over you as you experience, first hand, how thoroughly unromantic it is. You’re not Prince Charming holding Cinderella’s shoe, gazing off into the night. You’re just sitting alone on the side of a midwestern road, the sound of crickets and cicadas a poor replacement for the guy you’re head over heels for all over again._ _

__A guy who’s still alive, out there, in the real world._ _

__For the first time in a long time, coming back to your nurse and your bed doesn’t feel like waking up from a beautiful dream. It feels, instead, like it might be time to get your life the fuck together._ _

  



	4. i've seen the sun up ahead at the county line bridge

  


You tell them you need to connect.

They start to say you that you can’t, that you’re out of allotted time for the week, that you really can’t keep trying to bend the rules like this. When you stop them and explain and they realize you’re not talking about Westonville, they look more shocked than anything else. You realize they’d completely given up hope on you ever snapping yourself out of your digital hell.

That’s pretty reasonable. Maybe you wouldn’t have, if not for the fire you’ve got burning away under you, driving you to action. Maybe this is all part of a happy ending.

That is, if you can pilot it in for a landing instead of taking it into one of your signature nosedives.

Well, alrighty then.

Challenge accepted.

You’re tired of being sad and miserable and wondering what might have been. It’s time, you think, to stand up, take responsibility, and _do_ something about it.

They wheel you to the archive.

When you’re alone, you place a finger to the fibre-optic data port. There’s a static shock, you close your eyes, and you begin searching through information.

The grandchildren say you’re maddeningly slow on the stratonet, but it still feels absurdly fast to your aging brain. As fast as you frame a thought, it’s there, uploaded through your nerves to your visual cortex.

_Roxy Lalonde_.

There’s a whole lot of them. A Parisian model, a biology PhD at Columbia, a meteorologist from Hong Kong, a fictional European jewel thief. A few look-sees through their info tells you they’re probably not Dirk’s Roxy.

Dirk.

Intrusive thoughts start running wild, providing you with listings for every Dirk Strider on the gosh damned planet, ticket prices and booking options to go to see all of them, and a whole lot of super helpful images of fine young bucks wearing nothing but worn jeans (and sometimes less than that) out in the wilderness, covered in sweat and dirt. The damn thing is dangerously accurate, showing you just the right sort of guy -- tall and pale and ginger.

It’s distracting and then some. Words and listings you can ignore, but you’ve always been a visual sort of guy.

Damn.

You set safe search on, which winks out some of them, and grit your teeth to tune out the rest. Roxy. You’re trying to find this Roxy dame, because that’s what you _can_ do.

You think of everything Dirk told you, and you search the history of the system.

Shaanti, Westonville, San Junipero, they all came from the same place. Some brilliant engineer got it into their head that it might be possible to use the electrical charge from human consciousness as a power source, which was a bit of a moral quandary, so a couple of programmers and philanthropists tried to figure out how to make it work. In the end, they got your purgatory: a self sustaining graveyard where all participants were consenting and eager to join a server warehouse that provided a fully conscious digital afterlife. All that simulated brain activity kicks up a mighty electrical charge, of which only a fifth is needed to run the servers themselves. Another two fifths serves the energy industry, and the last of it helps people like you get online. Tourists, checking out the trial version.

You scan through a hell of a lot of articles about the business end of the thing. But you know the feeling of digging after a cold trail, and the public faces of the system aren’t right. Dirk said she was in the back-end, able to upload and manipulate code. If she exists in records, it’ll be a little pinprick of light, a flash of identity. You remember the debates about the system. Hearings. Hm.

You search, and search, and search, but you find nothing.

Just as you’re about to give up, you’re lazily scanning one of those articles dated in the late 20s with the first conversations about the system. The political ones. Failsafes, it’s talking about, and there she is, this one expert witness, addressing the United States Congress and then the UN, a gorgeous leggy blonde with honey-dark skin and hot pink gel bracelets.

You hit play on one of the vids.

“-- was brought on board to solve that question,” she’s saying, with a clear voice that you can just imagine giggling at Dirk’s worst and weirdest joke. “Can we condemn a mind to immortality? Since we theoretically can’t communicate with any of the brains inside this shi -- erm, system, we don’t know if a consciousness will degrade with time. Well, good news, I cracked it! I’ve developed a system that allows a consciousness to _self-terminate_ if it so desires, using a password it set before the upload!” She adjusts a long pink-and-purple scarf around her shoulders. “And so it can’t be abused, I also designed a sister-system which prevents the same thing from --”

Her voice fades as you stop paying attention, because now you’re trying to run facial rec on her. Full name Roxann Lalonde, which is why your search didn’t pull up shit, but armed with her legal name and her pretty face, her life sprawls out before you. Born in the Caribbean, studied CompSci in the States, and spent seven years in a Central Illinois tech company before moving up and on.

That’s where she met Dirk. They couldn’t have been older than thirty-three when they first locked eyes, and they’ve been together ever since.

You swallow hard, pulling your finger off the port. The images of Roxann blink away. You think it seems pretty likely that she’s heard of you. Not good things. Magnetic North, is what Dirk called her, which makes you the villain in her story.

Well. That’s all right, maybe. You deserve it. And now, all you can do is whatever you can.

Another hour or so on the stratonet gets you all the info you need.

*

“Janey,” you say.

“Jake?” You hear her pause, assess, consider, and then proceed. “You sound… different.”

“Yeppers,” you say. “I’m starting to figure out that I’m a real flippin’ idiot. But that’s okay, I think, because I’m trying to be less of one. Oh, lordie. I’ll have to explain all this, won’t I? For now -- how much would your husband charge me to hire him to defend someone I’ve never met?”

*

Dirk and his Camry aren’t waiting in the Blockbuster parking lot. You wait for a full hour before deciding that wasting your time just sitting on a yellow slab of concrete is a shit way to spend your night with a twenty-year-old’s body, and you get to your feet and start walking.

You know the way to the farmhouse. Without the car -- any car at all -- it takes hours to get there; the moon’s high above when you arrive. It’s still and empty, with no Camry in the driveway. You start to panic -- is the house unoccupied? Did they vacate Dirk’s ties to Westonville entirely? How are you going to find him again? You very much doubt Roxann Lalonde is going to be very helpful.

But his clothes are still in the closets, his books on the shelves, a stack of rented Blockbuster videos leaning precariously on the VCR. When you lay down in the empty bed, it smells like him -- and you, a little, and sex, and here you waste a solid ten minutes of your remaining time rubbing one out with Dirk’s blankets against your nose, thinking of the way he looks when you push into him, his mouth falling open and his head falling back and his eyes closing…

After you come, you feel a bit like a dirty old man, but it still takes you longer than it should to stop rolling around in his blankets like you’re trying to bathe in his lingering presence.

You get up, feeling like a real boob. There has to be something, some trail, some hint, some form of communication. He was here thirteen hours a day, he said. He can’t just have disconnected all at once, completely, could he have?

You tear the house apart search of a note or a sign or -- _something_ , but you’re getting pretty sure Dirk hasn’t been here at all. If he has, he hasn’t left anything for you. Midnight comes and takes you back to the real world with no more answers than you came with.

*

You search for him on both internet and stratonet, but there’s nothing. The man’s become a real ghost in his old age.

Really, all you have is Roxann Lalonde.

“Any luck contacting her?” you ask Jane on the line, eagerly.

She sighs. “Jake,” she breathes. “Do you want to tell me why you’re acting like this? One day, you sound like you barely want to be alive, and the next you’re chirping lilke a cricket in my ear, putting my husband on a million dollar retainer to defend a woman who hacked a government subsidised facility?”

“She needs help,” you insist. “She did it for a damn good reason. I explain it all in the files I sent.”

“All I’ve managed to glean from those files is that she used a backdoor in a system she helped build for the government to provide special services to a friend!”

“Are you saying he won’t be able to get her off? Gosh fucking darnit, Jane, you lied to me! You said he could get anyone off! You cad!”

Jane sighs. 

You grin.

“I think you might have gone crazy,” she says, finally. “But… you also sound more like yourself than you have since the accident, so I guess I’ll stop asking questions, for now, and tell Peter to keep trying to contact her.”

“Thanks Janey,” you say. “You’re one real hell of a lady.”

“Thanks, Jake,” she replies, and you’re both surprised at the sincerity in your voices. You clear your throat, she coughs, and you let her go.

*

A month after the night Dirk told you the truth, you turn the corner to the Blockbuster parking lot, expecting to see nothing. Maybe you’ll just sit and wait and hope, or maybe you’ll hike out to the farmhouse for the third time. You aren’t sure, yet.

But instead, you see him.

Leaning up against the passenger side door of his Camry, one knee bent to rest against the awful bronze finish, hands thrust into his pockets and shoulders hunched over. Just like always. You’re so damn surprised to see him there, that for a moment you don’t even believe it’s real. A mirage of a hopeful heart, fucking with you.

But he straightens and meets your eyes and he’s as real as anything here is.

“Did you fucking get Roxy a lawyer?” he demands.

You cross over to him, and you know you need to answer his question and ask how he’s here and whether he can stay and a hundred million other things, but you’re moving fast and you just collide into him, hands cupping his cheeks and pulling him down to kiss you. Some tiny part of you had already given up hope, you realize, and the feeling of him warm and solid beneath your digital hands shakes you to your core. He resists for only a half-second before wrapping his arms around you, pulling you closer, and you bury fingers in his hair and stroke your tongue into his mouth and yes, this is good, this is right, how did you ever live fifty years without him? How did you _choose_ to do it, and how did you survive your own idiocy?

It doesn’t seem possible.

You break off when the two of you start grinding your hips together like you’re teenagers again, drooping and resting your forehead against his shoulder and just trying to catch your breath. His fingers comb through the baby hairs on the back of your neck. Your legs are weak and you're painfully ready to go. You could take him right here easy, up against the car, his legs wrapped around you, his head falling back, his fingers clutching at your jacket -- but you want to talk to him.

You want to talk to him more than you want sex. 

“Dirk. Dirk, boy howdy,” you breathe. “You wouldn't believe how -- ah. Shitknickers, I missed you like crazy.”

He tenses against you. “If you missed me so bad, you could have --,” But he cuts himself off and shakes his head before slumping to rest his forehead against your shoulder. “Forget it, just -- forget it, that's petty. Ancient history, right? Compared to everything else."

"Everything else," you repeat.

"It was you, wasn’t it? This fancy-ass hot shot lawyer who came out of nowhere to defend Roxy, he’s married to a woman named Jane Crocker, and you -- that’s your Jane, isn’t it? This is all you.”

You step back. “I told you,” you say. “I’ll do anything I can.”

“She already had a lawyer.”

You jut your chin stubbornly. “Sure as goosefeathers not as good as this one.”

He pauses, and then sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “No, not as good as this one. Not by half.”

“Yeah, well,” you say, strangely proud of his impressed tone. “Janey sure knows how to pick ‘em!” You think about that and wince. “Or, I guess. She learned the hard way how not to pick them after the first time…”

He quirks a faint hint of a smile. “Yeah, well.”

You stand in silence for a moment. All your questions feel wrong to just start slinging out. It seems like he wants to say something, like he doesn’t know how, and you’re not sure you can talk before he does.

“I can’t stay long,” he says abruptly.

It’s honestly just a relief to hear his voice.

“I figured as much,” you say, because you did.

“I shouldn’t even fucking be here at all, honestly. I don’t know what I’m thinking. I could get her into even more trouble if anyone sees.” He runs a hand down his face. “Fuck, not even sure what I’m doing here.”

“I’m glad you are, though.”

Another beat of silence. God, you want to ask your questions. You need those answers. The absence of them burns inside of you. If he disconnects right now, winks out of existence, is that it? Is he gone for good? You need to know things before that happens.

But you think you’re starting to realize... you don’t _get_ to ask. You don’t get to invite yourself back into his life after you ejected him from yours, all those years ago. You don’t get to reach out beyond the borders of Westonville’s servers.

_He_ has to do that, and you’re scared shitless that he won’t.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he says at long last. “But I don’t think I’ll be able to come here again. Not for a long, long time.” He shakes his head, looking amazed. “You can’t imagine the difference a month makes. I’m not just going to live, I feel _alive_. I don’t want to claw myself out of my own diseased skin anymore. No one is going to let me into Westonville like this, and I don’t think they’re wrong about it.”

“I’m glad you feel better,” you say, biting your tongue so hard it hurts.

He meets your eyes.

“Jake,” he says.

“Hi,” you say.

You watch his jaw work. “I don’t --” he cuts himself off. Looks down at his hands. Your fingers twitch to stroke his cheeks, to cup his chin, to bury in his hair. You ball them into fists.

“I think all the time about what would have happened,” he says, quietly. “If we hadn’t -- fuck that, if _you_ hadn’t thrown it all away. It’s been running through my head my whole life, honestly, but since meeting you in here… fuck, it’s every day. Every moment. It wasn’t a fluke, you know? It wasn’t the circumstances, one crazy summer. We’re in our seventies and we slide right back together like it’s been no time at all. This could have been our lives. Our whole lives.”

It still could be, you want to say. You just reach out and take one of his hands, instead. He doesn’t pull away. That’s something.

“What if you fuck it up again?” he asks.

“I probably will,” you admit. “But not in the same way. Never that. I -- I don’t know how to tell you in a way that will convince you, and maybe I can’t, even! And Jeezy knows I’m still an addleblasted dunderfuck and I’m going to keep right on with that, but I’d rather punch myself right in the sack than ever let you go again even for a second, Dirk, and I’m not sure I deserve to be believed for that but it’s the right damn truth, okay?”

His jaw tightens and he closes his eyes tight, and then makes eye contact with you.

“I don’t forgive you,” he says.

You grimace out a half-smile. “I’m not sure you ever should,” you say.

Either that was the right answer, or he’d already made up his mind, because he gives you his address.

  



	5. man i ain't changed but i know i ain't the same

  


You check yourself out of the treatment centre.

It’s a shock to basically everyone. One moment, they’re discussing filing an injunction to disconnect you from Westonville because you’re in too deep, and then here you are, demanding to be discharged as soon as possible. Your doctors don’t love the idea. They want to try more treatments. There’s still a chance, they advise, that you could reclaim full function of your legs. You’re pretty sure they just like your money.

Eventually, despite stated concerns, they sign release papers. Within twelve hours, you’re on a plane to the States.

You think about Dirk.

You think about Dirk under the hot Alberta sun, shirtless and sweat-dappled and streaked with dirt. He catches your gaze, raises his hand to shield his eyes, and smiles at you.

Fifty years.

With these modern jets, it’s only about an hour from Sydney to Montana. Looking out the window, you see the Rockies jut from the earth towards heaven like fists of angry gods, steel-grey and cotton-white under a blue sky. This is where he chose to live, after semi-retiring from his simple tech job in Central Illinois. You ran to the other side of the globe, hiding in the Australian outback, and Dirk Strider made his home nestled into the slopes of the mountains where the two of you had first met.

Public transit hums and zips up those slopes and you practice things to say. Hey there. What's cooking? How's it going? Hullo friend. What's the news on the street? You become aware of your reflection in the window, and you furrow your brow as you stare at your grey hair, your lined face. White whiskers poke from your chin and you find yourself regretting your moustache for the first time in your entire life. You hadn’t had one that summer. You hold one hand up and it shakes a little. You’re an old man.

But he is, too.

The address you gave the shuttle is a small log cabin at the edge of a clear lake. It’s clustered with a bunch of other like buildings, old-fashioned and cozy and rough-hewn. It all has a strangely luddite feel, if you ignore the solar panels, the vehicles, the treads of the driveways, the hum and glow of energy. You wheel yourself up to the door, looking around, your throat dry, your middle roiling.

You don’t need to knock.

It just opens.

And he’s there in front of you.

“You have hair,” you say. You prepared yourself for him not to.

“It came back in fast.” His voice is cracked and rumbles in his throat. His hair is white and thin, his skin furrowed deep with frown-lines, his freckles indistinguishable from the collage of age spots. He’s shorter than he was, thicker around the middle, hunched in the shoulders a bit, and his arms and legs and neck and chest are so skinny you’re afraid he might blow away.

He doesn’t look a damn thing like the gorgeous young buck you first met with his xylphone ribs, pale pink nipples, and long delicate fingers.

But you’d know him anywhere.

“Do you want to come in?” he asks.

You choke back a sob and bob your head enthusiastically. “Oh, yes. Fucking yes, please.”

His face cracks with a smile and he helps you maneuver your chair through the door.

*

You talk.

All day, until the sun sets and leaves you in darkness. Dirk consults a touchpad on the arm of his wingback chair and orange-tinted lights come up, and you keep talking. You rehash things you’ve been over a dozen times in Westonville. Jane, marriage, Daniel, cancer. Westonville. Roxy. Grey dawn starts to bleed through the windows and Dirk gets up to make coffee. You drink and don’t stop talking.

At some point, you doze off in your wheelchair and wake up blinking away sleep. Dirk is curled up on the couch across from you, and you take the opportunity to really study him, this strange old man you’ve only just met housing the soul you’ve been with in Westonville, who you fell in love with in the summer of 1996. You stare at him and catalogue all the differences until you start to reconcile the two, seeing all the places where they overlap and building a bridge between the boy you knew and the man you're with.

“Dirk,” you whisper.

His eyes flicker open. Everything else about him has changed, but his warm amber eyes are the same as ever.

You swallow hard. “I sure am glad I’m here, Dirk,” you say, your voice husky.

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “I -- me, too.”

“Do you… mind if I sit with you?” you ask, and thump the arms of your chair. “I get real sick of being in this damn thing.”

He helps you over. It’s a bit of a how-to-do. He’s still weak from his bout with cancer, and you’re dead weight from the navel down, but the two of you make it work. Before long, you’re up against him on the couch, pillowing your head against his thigh, listening to his blood pump.

And,

The thing about Westonville and all the other towns and cities like it in all the different eras that they live in is that they’re indistinguishable from reality. They feel as real as anything ever does.

Or so you’ve always thought.

Because being here with Dirk, resting against him, hearing him breathe, it’s different. Maybe it’s in your head. But there’s an authenticity to this that makes shivers go down your spine, like you can breathe in and taste the molecules and energy that make up time and space, and they flavour everything else. You feel the weight of your age and your flesh, and every passing second is all the more precious for its transience and fragility.

You want to say that, to explore everything that spins off from it. You want to chart those paths and discover the meaning at the end of each of them. You want to pour over every friggin bit of every implication of the reality of Dirk Strider, alive and here and with you.

Thing is, you always get overwhelmed by all the possibilities of things to say. Things you want to say, or know you should say, or don’t know how to say. If you were any good at taking things down to their molecular level and understanding your feelings and being any damn good at communication, you would just roll the clock back to 1996. Fifty years hasn’t taught you how to deal with your own emotions or anyone else’s.

So you just take a deep breath through your nose.

“I love you,” you say.

You think that, maybe, it says a lot of things at once, and it’s the easiest thing in the world.

His fingers dig into your hair as his breath catches. “Jake…” he murmurs.

You turn your face to press a kiss against him. “I’d kiss you, now,” you say, matter-of-factly, “but I can’t leverage these old damn bones up there to your mouth.”

“Okay,” he replies, and with some effort into adjustments, he makes it happen.

*

Dirk’s cottage is equipped with all the gadgets and accoutrements you’d expect from a place where he lived, and you settle into things quickly. He sets to cleaning up the wealth of clutter so your chair can maneuver more easily, and you crack the seal on a beautiful kitchen you doubt has ever been used.

After that first night where you just sleep in your chair and against him on the couch, it’s agreed upon without saying that you share his bed. You big-spoon him gratefully, pressing your face into his thin, white hair. Unlike yours, which has gone as coarse as pubes in your old age, his is as soft as you remember from 1996 both real and digital.

You roll down to the docks whenever you have the moment, and you find that you love the quiet. At first you feel frustrated by your inability to leap into the water and swim, but after a while, the placid surface and the stillness becomes its own sort of nirvana. Dirk joins you one evening with fishing tack, and he sits at the edge, feet dangling, and the two of you laugh and talk and fish for hours, until you’ve got a decent bucket of bioengineered lake stock. You cook it.

He seems surprised and upset the first time you maneuver yourself to open his pants. He looks down at you like you’re a rattlesnake, and you look up, a little hurt.

“No?” you ask, feeling his cock stir against your hands and feeling relieved that, if nothing else, it’s not that he isn’t attracted to you without your strong young body and handsome smooth face.

“It’s just -- hell, Jake, you can’t…” he trails off.

Your anxieties melt and you grin. “Now, there, hold on. You think I’m the sort of fella who doesn’t get a solid dose of the jollies from giving as well as receiving?”

“I think,” he says, deadpan in the face of being teased, “that you’re the sort of dude who’s never been shy about liking to come.”

You tug at his pants, letting his dick spring free, and press a kiss against his inner thigh. It’s unbelievably smooth. “I like it when _you_ come,” you say, and he sighs, and you get to work, intent on proving just how decent you’ve gotten at giving a blowjob in fifty years after all.

Days pass unmarked, then weeks, and before long you don’t even know how long you’ve been in the cottage community. Without the countdown to Saturday night, when your nurse arrives with the EEG nodes to upload you to Westonville, time just… blurs. Disappears. You’ve never been time’s biggest fan. You don’t miss it.

*

Dirk is at the store getting the stuff for you to make a roast when she arrives.

The door opens and you look up and a woman about your age with honey-gold skin, hot pink hair, and about thirty scarves is standing there. You meet her eyes. She looks about as surprised as you.

“Who the heckie are you?” she demands.

It’s her voice that you recognize. It hasn’t aged the way that yours and Dirk’s have, and you immediately place it from the vids of the hearings you watched on the stratonet.

“Roxy?” you ask, shocked.

She juts a hip, plants a fist on it, and glares at you. “You’ve got about eighteen seconds to tell me where Dirk is, buddy, or things are gonna get real bad, here.”

You hold up your hands in surrender. “He’s at the store!” you say.

“And he left you to watch his house?” she demands.

“No, gosh dammit, just listen to me -- I live here!”

That shocks you both into silence. She cocks her head and considers while you turn the statement over, marvelling at the apparent truth of it. You don’t even know how long you’ve been up here, but it sure has been long enough to count as habitation, you think.

“I didn’t know he had a boyfriend right now,” she says, which is also a thing that’s technically true and yet remained completely unspoken. You feel a goofy sort of grin spread across your face.

“I think that’s what I am,” you say, a little awed.

“Well…” she softens and moves toward you. “Well, good. He’s been all bamboozled by Jake-stuff lately, he needed to get laid. What’s your name, friendo?”

You aren’t sure how to answer, and in your panicked silence, it only takes her a few minutes to realize just who, exactly, you are. You count yourself lucky that Dirk arrives only a few seconds after she starts yelling, and you’re able to wheel yourself into hiding while he has her attention.

After considerably more yelling and a slammed door, he comes and gets you.

“Oops,” you say.

“She’s heard the worst of you,” he says.

“I get it,” you say with a watery sort of grin. “There’s a whole damn lot of worst to hear about me, after all.”

“You’ve been the fuckin’ boogeyman for so long. Source of all the bullshit in my life. After every bad break-up, she’d come over and make me play fighting games and spend the whole time telling me that it wasn’t my fault, it was yours.”

You wince at that. But you’ve had the same thought a few times, hearing about his life.

“It might take her a while to adjust to…” He furrows his brow and gestures vaguely around you both. “This, I guess,” he mutters.

And you feel a flutter of something in your chest. You cock your head, looking up at him. “Oh?” you ask, trying to sound casual. “What’s ‘this,’ then, Dirk?”

He looks at you, expression totally unreadable, for _just_ long enough that you start to panic. What if Roxy said something that made him rethink your presence up here? Is this time-suspended mountain paradise about to come to an abrupt and bullshit ending?

But when he finally moves, he just shakes his head and cups your cheek. You think he’s smiling faintly, but you can’t be sure; you’re still not an expert at charting the cartography of his lined face.

“Whatever this is,” Dirk murmurs.

*

You lay awake that night. Dirk is in the other room, pacing. He didn’t say so to your face, but you know he’s talking to Roxy. He’s trying to keep his voice low, and you’re trying to catch whatever stray words you can. Which are exactly zero words, because your hearing isn’t what it used to be.

You hear the front door shut and then silence for a bit. You look up at the ceiling. Time passes.

You hear him come back in through the back. The shower runs. You imagine him standing under the hot water, pickling himself the way he always has. If you close your eyes, you can imagine you’re at the farmhouse in Westonville, waiting for him to come back to bed so you can pull him to you, bury your face into his wet hair, and ravish him all over again.

When he slides in behind you, you nuzzle into his shoulder.

“Did I wake you up?” he asks quietly.

“No,” you murmur.

“Sorry,” he says. “Went for a swim to clear my head.”

You desperately want to ask him what Roxy’s been saying, ask whether or not she’s managing to convince him to kick you out, but you know you don’t have the right. You think, instead, about how this would go if you were in Westonville.

“Hey,” you say. “You should fuck me.”

He freezes for a second, and you feel heat suffuse his body. “You won’t feel it…” he hedges, his voice a little hoarse.

You snort and bite his shoulder. “Malarkey. I’ll feel your hands on me and your breath on my face and your weight over me and your tongue in my gob --”

He cuts you off with a desperate kiss, which you definitely feel.

*

Dirk’s late night conversations with Roxy continue, and so does your buzzing, painful anxiety about them. Every time he comes to bed, you think that it’s the moment when this all ends, but against all odds, the dream continues uninterrupted.

You’re sitting at the edge of the dock with a fishing line in the water, one day, when you feel a presence prickling at your shoulder, and you half-turn in your chair. You knew it wasn’t Dirk, but you’re still alarmed and kind of terrified when it’s Roxy. Your mouth goes dry and your throat works to swallow. She shoots you a little glare, just so you know how things stand, and then it’s painful silence o’clock for an age. You’re deeply aware of your inability to swim, and are pretty sure you’re dead meat if she decides to shove you off the pier and into the water.

“He says you feel bad,” she says eventually, breaking the silence.

You bob a furious nod. “Do I ever! Why, Roxy, er, Roxanne, or, Ms. Lalonde, I -- I could just beat myself bleeding from here to Timbuktu over just _how_ bad I feel about everything that --”

“And I say who fucking cares if’n you feel bad! Fifty years of scars and heartache is too much damn time for someone to just be cut up about it! At any frickin’ time you could have looked him up and told him that it wasn’t his fault and kept him from self-destructing every good thing that happened to him while you were off just happily living away!”

You hold your tongue.

She folds her arms.

“There was a dude inside Dirk Strider who never got to come out and live his actual life because of you,” she spits. Her forehead crumples into prodigious furrows. “Some nice soppy soft boy who got married and had a normal anxiety-free life. You dammed up the path he was supposed to take and that’s dumb, Jake English, that’s mean and dumb, and what kind of name is _English,_ anyway? Are you a Bond villain? Are you the world’s worst Bond villain, asshat?”

“No?” you hazard.

“Eat me,” she replies.

You shrink in your chair. You feel a tug at your line and don’t dare touch it.

She notices your line bobbing.

“You have a fish,” she says.

“Erm, yep,” you agree.

“Well, what the fuck, come on, yank that bad boy up here, are you going to deprive D-Stri of fresh fish, too?”

So you hook your catch, and the line pulls taut, jerking you forward so hard your wheels roll against their locks. You gasp, cranking your reel hard, watching the tip of your rod dip further and further towards the water.

A massive, monster of a beast breaks the surface, arcing through the air, and you jump in shock when Roxy lets out a delighted little noise.

A moment later, she comes and grabs the back of your chair to help leverage you, and together, you pull the fish in.

When it’s lying on the wooden pier, gasping for water and finding only air, you both cheer, and then Roxy seems to remember herself. She cuts herself off, steps back, and goes back to glaring at you.

“Dirk says you’re the angel who got me the new lawyer,” she says. “He’s your ex-wife’s husband.”

“It’s the truth,” you say.

“You weren’t too damaged to get married,” she says accusingly. “Lucky! I bet some guy didn’t up and leave you out of nowhere one night when you were seventeen and jack your brain up for life, or something!”

When you don’t reply -- because you don’t know how -- she sighs.

“He got me off,” she says. “Dirk isn’t gonna be sneaking into Westonville anymore, but with the cancer gone, and -- and with -- well, maybe he won’t need to.”

And then,

“If you hurt him again, I swear, I _swear_ , you lil shit --”

With that, she stomps off.

*

You tell Dirk about the encounter while cleaning the massive fish.

“Huh,” he says. “... I think we should have her over for dinner.”

*

At first, you’re just worked up about having to see her again. You’ve never done well with people who don’t like you, which is why most of the problems in your life have come from doing the thing that you think the most people want you to do, rather than what you know you should. You’ve sunk to some truly awful depths trying to keep anyone from being disappointed or upset with you, and here’s Roxy, Dirk’s ‘magnetic north,’ who already plumb hates you about as much as someone _can_. You don’t like that. You don’t know how to _deal_ with that.

But then…

But then, as you prepare a menu and slave over it, mostly just thinking about how you can get to this pink woman’s heart through her stomach, you start thinking about lost time, about hosting dinner parties with Dirk, about what could have been. About, maybe, what still can be, if you can get this conscientious objector on board.

Dirk still talks to Roxy late into the night, but not every day, anymore. And sometimes, you hear him laugh or grumble, rather than speaking in hushed and tense voices. He sighs happily when he slides into bed beside you, and the length of his showers shorten.

The two of you have snapped some pictures here and there, and you’re going through them the night before Roxy’s coming to dinner with her plus one. You still don’t know exactly how long you’ve been here, except that the nights are a lot shorter and the days a lot warmer than they were. You don’t like to guess, don’t want to break the spell of everything hanging suspended, but the pictures make it seem as if you’ve been here a year or more. Dirk’s weight has come back in his face and wrists, and his hair is thicker than it was. You’ve browned darker than a junebug and gained muscle back in your shoulders. And you smile broader now, fuller, both of you. It touches your eyes, gives you both deep crow’s feet, shows your teeth.

“I’m a right fucking idiot, aren’t I?” you murmur to yourself, looking at the photos. The damn things could go back fifty years, spanning adventures and friendships and dinner parties galore.

*

Dirk is helping you set the table when Roxy bursts in without knocking in a flurry of movement. She’s got a big ole bottle of non-alcoholic bubbly in her arms, and she deposits it into Dirk’s hands as soon as he’s in reach.

“You should put that in the fridge,” she says, before turning to glare at you.

You’re so focused on not quailing beneath her gaze that you almost don’t notice her guest come in behind her. It’s the _click-click_ of her gait in her ubiquitous heels that catches your attention. Your mouth falls open as your eyes slide off Roxy and onto your ex-wife.

“Janey?” you ask.

She pushes up her glasses and shakes her head. “This is a bad idea,” she says. To Roxy, not you.

“You’ll keep me from getting too angry at him,” Roxy points out in this rehearsed, tired way, as if she’s said it a thousand times today already.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jane says, crossing her arms and fixing you with a hawk’s gaze that could put Roxy’s glower to shame. “I’m a bit fussed with him, myself, I’ll have you know.”

Roxy is quiet and watchful while you all eat soup and salad. Jane explains that they met during the trial and got along famously without knowing the real depth of their connection. They both like classic video games, asian food, R&D, and designer lipsticks. 

“And now that all the cards are dealt, we both know what a fucking jackass you are, too,” Roxy pipes up while you and Dirk are serving up seared chicken and vittles.

Jane folds her hands on the table, looking down at her plate. “That, too,” she says, voice tight. “You couldn’t have called me or even left a message when you checked yourself out of the centre out of nowhere, Jake?”

Oh, gumballs, you’d completely forgotten.

“Er, well,” you stumble to say, “I didn’t, that is, it didn’t seem necessary, Janey! Now I know you’ve been a real rock through all this, but we haven’t been married since George W. Bush was president! I didn’t...”

All three of them are looking at you, and you hunch your shoulders.

“I just didn’t think of it,” you admit. “I was in a real hurry, see.”

Jane shakes her head. Roxy rolls her eyes. Dirk hides a smile. You cling to that last one through awkward chicken.

With dessert -- peach cobbler -- on the table, Dirk turns his attention to Jane.

“Hey,” he says, darting around to look at the rest of you before leaning across the table like he’s going to tell her a secret. “Sorry about this, I just. Uh. Did he ever… what did you know about me? If anything.”

Jane looks at Roxy. Roxy bites her lip and looks at Dirk. You look at your peach cobbler.

“He told me about you once,” Jane says, quiet. “On a payphone from Alberta, in the summer of 1996. He couldn’t stop talking about you, and I was jealous, and we fought. And even then, I knew exactly what was going on but I pretended I didn’t and married him anyway.” She pushes at her cobbler, then lifts her head to give Jake a tight smile. “You were always different with me, after that call, you know. I don’t know if you were ever unguarded with me again.”

You don’t know what to say.

Thankfully, they change the subject. Video games appear to be the biggest venn diagram circle, which you’ve always been a dunce about, and that lets you sit back and observe, which honestly you’re better at in a bigger group, like this. Dirk looks like a wise old professor as he weighs in. Jane loosens and chatters animatedly. Roxy gestures expansively with her fork.

Roxy’s bottle pops open, and she and Dirk drink it while you and Jane indulge in something with a little more ABV. It makes you feel looser, less overwhelmed by the weight of the deserved judgement around you, and more able to appreciate less negative attention. Jane’s fond tongue-clucking and Dirk’s long, poignant looks and Roxy studying you in a way that makes you realize that she actually might not have fully made up her mind about you, yet.

Roxy hooks up to Dirk’s sound system. She winds back through the years with her music choices until she’s playing the music from when all of you were teenagers, starting with songs that have become classics, loved by all generations -- Nirvana, Alanis, Radiohead -- and then devolving into the sort of thing most people have tried to forget.

Dirk gets up and shuts the sound off while Roxy is trying to get Jane to sing along with the Spice Girls.

“I have neighbours and a reputation,” he says, pained.

Roxy puts on One Headlight by The Wallflowers, instead. Dirk nods in approval, and before long you’re _all_ singing along. _But me and Cinderella, we put it all together, and we can drive it home with one headlight!_

You think you have an epiphany about what this song is about, maybe.

Jane wheels you down the pier and you tell her all the information you’ve gleaned about the valley. She’s quiet, but attentive. The two of you stop at the foot of the dock and she gazes out over the water, which placidly reflects the moon back up at the sky.

“You seem good,” she says finally.

You’re surprised; you were waiting for her to lay into you for not telling her where you were going. “I am good,” you say after a moment of recovery. “I’m better than good, I’m… I’m friggin’ aces, you know?”

She nods, wrapping her arms around herself. “This is where you were supposed to be, isn’t it, Jake? I wonder, if I hadn’t gotten so angry at you that day on the phone…”

You reach over and take one of her hands in both of yours. You look down at her thin, waxy skin, rubbing your calloused thumbs over the lines of her bones and veins. “Oh, Janey,” you murmur. “Hells bells, if we start and if thening every aspect of what happened that summer…” You shake your head. “It was me. Okey-doke? It was me all the way up and down, and nobody else.”

When the two of you get back to the cottage, Dirk and Roxy are talking, their heads close together. They look up when they hear you come in.

Roxy sighs and rolls her eyes, but pats the seat next to her on the chair. “Get over here, Janey,” she says. “And bring idiot.”

When you’re all clustered together, Roxy pulls out a small box.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Dirk grouses, sounding every inch the old man. He’s even rocking in his chair. “You were just cleared of federal charges. What if you get caught again?”

“I’m not gonna get caught, obvs, come on.” She reaches over to slap his hands before opening the box and revealing eight very familiar looking EEG nodes.

Oh.

Gosh.

You’ve been so darned happy up here in the Montana Rockies that you didn’t even realize how much you’d missed Westonville until you’re looking at it on a platter in front of you.

Jane leaps up from her seat. “Roxy! I can’t see this! I’m married to your attorney, for land’s sakes!”

“Oh, sit down,” Roxy says, tossing her shock of pink hair. “That’s only gonna end up mattering if I get caught again and I’m definitely not getting caught this time.”

“This is a bad idea,” Dirk murmurs.

Roxy raises an eyebrow. “Do you not want them, then, smartass?”

You reach out for them without thinking, terrified that she might be serious.

She gives you a mild look of consternation, and then turns it on Dirk.

He shifts in his chair, and you see colour creeping up his neck. “Of course I want them, Rox,” he says quietly.

She nods. “Of course,” she echoes. “Cause you and him are -- well, it’s not _going_ anywhere, whatever I might think about the whole thing. And you need to get fucked, fam.”

“Jesus,” Dirk winces.

“Oh my god, Roxy!” Jane buries her face in her hands.

You can’t help but grin, and Roxy catches your expression. She pauses, and then flashes you a smile of her own.

“He’s insufferable when he can walk straight,” she sighs.

Dirk groans. Jane clasps her hands over her mouth, holding in horror or laughter, you don’t know which.

Rox pulls out four of the EEG nodes. She palms two and hands the others to Jane, and then leans over to pass Dirk the box. He holds it close to his chest, protective and tense, like he thinks they might run away.

“Here’s the rules,” Roxy says. “We got caught before because you were full-timing it. Server load was off the hook. Easy to spot. Well, none of that shit, not this time. We go in at the same time as all the other alive peeps, once a week for five hours on Saturday night, set to disconnect at midnight. We move with the horde on this, and it’s just four more raindrops in a fucking deluge. Ain’t nobody gonna catch that shit. We do this smart… and we’ll be doing it until the day we all go full-time up in there for real.”

“We,” Dirk repeats.

“Yes, we,” Roxy says, sitting up straight with authority. “Because if this bullshit with the two of you is permanent, and you sure as shit aren’t listening to my advice to make it anything else, I’m getting to know the jerkwad! Until I don’t find him such a friggin’ jerkwad. And once I’m tagging along, it just feels mean not to invite Janey. She’s part of this weird dumb family, right, Janey?”

“I don’t…” Jane demures.

“You don’t have to come along, course. I know you got Peter and a whole gaggle of mini-Janes and also some kind of empire to run or whatever. But, you never know, you might have a Saturday night free every so often, and if you do, I _know_ you wanna come hang out in an old Blockbuster and rent some N64 games.”

Dirk runs his fingers across the nodes. He shakes his head. “It’s a real bad idea,” he says. “I don’t want to cause any more trouble for you. It was my fault you were brought up on charges the first time, and now you want me to just accept you putting your ass out for me again?”

“Yeah,” says Roxy. “Yeah, I sure fucking do.”

And Dirk doesn’t know how to argue with that.

“One last thing,” Roxy says on her way out the door the next morning, her hair sticking up everywhere from her night on the couch, Jane huddling at her side with a nip of the brown bottle flu.

“What?” you ask, from behind Dirk. You’re skittering with energy, just waiting for the big bad catch.

“I had to delete the Camry. It moves around. Takes up too much space that way, easier to notice. But the house… you know, it’s small. It’s stationary. And I couldn’t bring myself to uproot it when I gutted the rest of your original program. I know you spent… a lot of time there.”

“Rox…” Dirk says.

She reaches up and pats Dirk on the cheek. “You’re welcome.”

  



	6. but me and cinderella, we put it all together

  


You think the week is going to pass like the movements of a pre-melt glacier. You think you won’t be able to sleep or eat. You think you’re going to be in physical frigging pain waiting for Saturday to arrive.

But the surprise is how easy it is to settle back into how much you just love being with Dirk. This Dirk. 2049 Dirk.

You love going for walks along the lake’s edge.

You love being curled up in front of the fire.

You love sitting down to meals.

You don’t even feel bereft in the way you thought you might when you make love. The promise of Westonville and all its youthful delights don't diminish the feeling of Dirk’s gnarled hands, in turns gentle and demanding on your skin. The two of you have learned to find pleasure in ways you might never have discovered if you were still all systems go below the belt. There's wonder in that.

There's wonder in all of it.

You’re flushed with excitement for Saturday, but you wouldn’t trade the six other days of the week to get you there any faster.

You’re an old man, and you’ve finally learned how to cherish time instead of wishing it away.

*

Of course, it doesn’t make you any more stoked and fired to go when the big day rolls around.

Dirk takes his time affixing the EEG nodes to your temples. His fingers are feather-light. You're fidgeting in the chair, tapping your nails against the arm.

"Hold still," he murmurs.

"I can't!"

He presses a kiss to your forehead before going back to work, and it gives you some calm. You breath out and close your eyes and drink in both scent and sense of him so close to you. He hums under his breath, a tune you don’t recognize, but it feels familiar and comfortable and good.

"Okay," he says. He takes his seat beside you.

It’s 7:00 PM, and you go under together.

You open your eyes in Westonville. Roxy’s got you loaded into a back alley, all alone. Probably to avoid attention; when you get yourself out to the street, you know where you are. It’s just a minute’s walk away from run-down Blockbuster and the parking lot you’ve visited so many times.

He’s waiting.

In fact, they all are.

Jane is raven-haired again, her eyes bright behind her glasses, and her body back to being plump and curvy, the way you remember. She looks like she did when she was your girl, before the heels and nails and lipstick, back when she wore jean-skirts, sneaks, and Nintendo Power tshirts.

Roxy is a grade A drop-dead knock-out, blonde with pink streaks, tall, leggy, and bombshell gorgeous. You silently thank every deity ever known that Dirk’s as gay as he is, or else you’d never have had another shot with him, because he’d never have let this one out of his grasp.

And Dirk.

Dirk, looking the way he did the first time you saw him. Pale and ginger and freckled and tall, loose tank and tied flannel and Converse sneakers and scuffed old jeans. Familiar and so alien, now, because you can’t stop seeing the age spots and lines and all the other hints of the man he’d become.

The four of you meet here, in Westonville, seventy and weighted with your choices and your years, seventeen and fresh-faced and back at the start.

*

It’s five minutes to midnight.

Jane disconnected hours ago, and Rox made herself scarce. You and Dirk hitched a ride out into the country, and found the farmhouse just the way you left it. You intend to talk, to sit, to not just fall into bed like horny teenagers, but hell, you can’t help yourself. There’s a whole lot of wonder that you’ve discovered out there in 2049, but there’s still no replacement for the way Dirk looks when you ease yourself into him.

After you’ve both come -- twice -- Dirk is curling himself under your arm, and it’s nice to be the strong one. It’s nice to feel protective and powerful and manly as you wrap your arms and legs around him and he comes in close and your heartbeats sync up under the blankets.

“Hey,” he says, his voice a breath in the darkness.

“Hi,” you reply.

“Uh,” he says. “I, uh. I love you, too.”

Your throat closes up and you have to blink real fast. “Oh,” you say.

He pulls in closer. You put your chin in his soft, thick hair. You watch the clock. 11:46. 11:47. 11:48.

“Also,” he says. “I forgive you, Jake.”

*

Disconnecting is surprisingly easy.

You miss your legs, and you miss your dick, but the truth is, you’ve got a whole lifetime of Westonville ahead of you. A thousand lifetimes. Everything there will be there for as long as you want to be part of it or the servers melt in the expanding sun a billion years from now. After everything is done and you have no days left to live, you and Dirk and maybe even Roxy and Jane will just keep on going, in Westonville, 1996.

For now, though, the doctors say you’re still healthy. Dirk’s remission is unchallenged. They say you could live forty more years, or even more, depending on how medical science advances.

You hope you make it fifty. One year reclaimed for every one you wasted.

Just seems right, you know?

  



End file.
